LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



LESSONS OF THE AGES, 



BY THEODORE PARKER. 



THROUGH THE INSPIRATION OF 







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y 



MISS S. A. RAMSDELL. 



If we are God's, then let us do God's work> 
And grapple with the fires of hell, 
To burn to dross the selfishness 
Inwrought in soul desire. 



NOV ^882j 




BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR. 

43 KILBY STREET. 
1882. 



^ 
^ 



^ 



Copyright, 1882, 
By Sarah A. Ramsdell. 



C. M. A. Twitchell & Co., 43 Kilby Street, 
PRINTERS. 



MY GUIDE AND I. 



A FRIEND once met me in the dark, 
And through much cunning and fine art, 
Said : " Come with me, the way seems fair, 
We'll walk along, a loving pair, 
And give ourselves to duty's call, 
Not asking Self or love at all, 
But simply say ' in God we trust.' 
Follow what will, come what must, 
Our standard high, our faith supreme, 
Humanity the living stream 
That we must better if we can, 
By lending will to heart and hand. 
Unfurl our banner for the right, 
The only power that giveth might ; 
Step down, if need be to secure 
The gem called Charity, whose birth is pure, 
And greater than a diadem 
To crown the hearts of living men. 
To angels help we will give heed, 
Asking whenever much in need, 
And if the way seems filled with doubt 
We'll never stop and turn about, 
But bravely on, the uphill side 
Oft times presents the loveliest ride. 
And in our journey on together 



MY GUIDE AND I. 



We will be friends in spite of weather, 

In spite of all that's dark and drear 

We will with fate hold goodly cheer, 

And never murmur on the way, 

But greet the monarch day by day, 

As picking in the affairs of life 

Is held to us the signal strife. 

Must we turn back, think ye, my friend, 

When duty calls and angels lend 

Their strength of purpose to our walk? 

Let us be careful how we talk, 

Let us be careful how we act, 

If angels guide this love compact. 

The world expects roses full blown 

From every bush that heaven hath shown, 

Without a thorn, all coloring true, 

Without a yellow mixed with blue, 

Without a sham of any kind 

To save the world from being blind. 

Think ye, my friend, we can succeed 

By giving life to human need ? 

Succeed in yielding to the test 

That God smites those he loves the best, 

And crowns them with a work in hand, 

Sustained in full by angel band ? " 

I said : " My friend, your way seems clever, 

Although despondent in foul weather. 

Show me the truth — I'll give my life, 

I'll enter in the coming strife ; 

I'll bend to circumstances all 

That may surround me like a pall, 

To find this God of truth and right 



MY GUIDE AND I. 



That took my mother from my sight, 

And folded down the curtain dark 

That shut from view one heavenly spark." 

I said : " My life is poor indeed, 

I'm helpless in the coming need, 

Do with me as you will. Oh friend ! 

I do myself most willing lend ; 

Try me by every art you please, 

On rugged ground, in paths of ease. 

I would be true in every way, 

If I am chosen at this day 

To give my life at heaven's high call 

I would yield self, and home and all ; 

I'll take my sister by the hand, 

I'll reach to you in heavenly land 

For council and as guide to lead 

Me safely through the tangled weed. 

Again, I say to thee, Oh friend, 

My life to you I willing lend, 

Give it the coloring that you please, 

The discipline devoid of ease : 

I must be suited in my giving, 

Else my poor life is scarce worth living." 

You say, " we must not talk of ease 

When we have this whole world to please, 

But I will do my best endeavor 

To balance foul with fairer weather, 

And as this compact is agreed 

I'll state to you my present need. 

A scribe I want, with pen in hand, 

To give my thoughts from spirit land ; 

I've tried in many ways to find 



MY GUIDE AND I. 



One suited wholly to my mind, 

But well I know a perfect zest 

Was never found in any guest, 

And so I take you, sister, friend, 

And do my duty to the end. 

I'll give you books — can you indeed 

Make them supply your present need ? 

Give you bread without the honey, 

Experience without the money, 

And as you are the one I choose, 

I'm sure to win and never lose, 

For well I know no trick can enter 

Where money fails to be the centre ; 

And well I know the golden lever 

Can never you from duty sever. 

I'll give you books, a few short years, 

I'll give you smiles, and also tears ; 

I'll give you aspirations grand, 

And lead you with my spirit hand 

To where the soul shall find new light, 

That breakest through the darkest night, 

And leaves the captive mind as free 

As crested foam upon the sea. 

And when I've tested all your worth, 

And opened out the newer birth, 

Think you, my friend, I can dissever 

The ties that bind us well together ? 

And leave you when you're most in need 

Of strength to battle with life's creed ? 

I know you've oft times thought it strange 

That I could take you such a range, 



MY GUIDE AND I. 



Without more comforts on the way 

To give more strength from day to day ; 

But well I know the faith that's best 

Is never found beneath a crest. 

Now at this time and in this place 

Let us in friendship still embrace 

A newer work of broader hue, 

Both suited to myself and you. 

It shall combine in system grand 

To show myself throughout the land, 

And take no money at the door, 

Although I know you're wondrous poor. 

But still have faith, like Ruth of old, 

I never can be bought or sold, 

But in your case, on moneyed land, 

I'll give to you a business band 

That will probe hearts with rod of love, 

Dipped in the fountain head above. 

Do you agree to this new scheme ? " 

" I answered yes, as in a dream." 

" Then here's my hand, my sister true, 

We'll sift the old world and the new, 

And bring our work within the range 

Of every human heart and grange." 

I sat quite still, I could not think 

The spirit brought me to this brink 

Of joys so grand, so filled with awe. 

I said, Oh God ! take every flaw, 

I would be pure as him of old, 

Who in his deeds shone forth as gold. 

I would be free from sin of every kind, 



MY GUIDE AXD I. 



Of selfishness that so distracts the human mind ; 

I would be free, that angels in their great desire 

Might touch me with that living fire 

Called Inspiration, and blend with me 

For double life and work. 

My guide then spoke, I held the cadence long, 

He said, " My child be strong, brace well your feet, 

On smoother ground we surely soon shall meet. 

I've heard the new renunciation with joy, with hope, 

You nevermore shall in the darkness grope ; 

For in this living stream of truth 

You'll find fair health and more of youth — 

You'll find me true to every promise given, 

I'll make it fast with knot of old gold ribbon. 

Therefore be strong, be doubly stayed, 

And brave and true as Orleans maid, 

When in the springtime's early day 

I bear you on your journey's way, 

And stand in honor by your side, 

A claimant for a spirit bride, 

To work with me while time shall claim 

The rivulet sounding in your name. 



THE LESSONS OE THE AGES 



CHAPTER I. 



WH O shall paint the lessons of the ages ? 
Not one who has always carried flowers in 
her hand, or song bird notes in her soul ; not one 
whose life has always detected a blossom at the close 
of every experience, or felt friendship in every extended 
hand, or smiling face. Not by one shall the lessons of 
the ages be wrought out, who has never tasted poverty, 
or seen the hungry wolf in the distance, battling for 
that which God has given freely, but man has closed 
about with laws more arbitrary than Satan ever dared 
to assume. No, the lessons of the ages must be written 
by one who has suffered in many ways. Prostrated by 
sickness for years, but held to earth by God's hand of 
love, to be a ministering help to impart to the world 
what God may give to her of material spiritualism, 
which is the bud of promise now opening to the world, 
and of its flowering the coming years must each hold 
out its prize offering, to be tested by science and fath- 
omed by knowledge. God's basic testimony in every 
outlay of Deific skill. 



10 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

No, these lessons must be penned by a woman, 
chosen to do this work, for, from natal condition was 
seen, that strength was given to suffer for truth or prin- 
ciple, although the fagots stood as clearly out in their 
burning glory, as they did to the martyred Joan of Arc, 
still, the aspiring soul saw God above all, with a glory 
of the resurrection, a brilliant and final success, and 
no earthly chalice however bitter, could frighten the ex- 
pression of truth imbedded in the soul of the writer, and 
ready to act with those truths, when God opened the 
way for their benefit to mankind. 

The way is opening, for in 1878 the cry is for truth, 
for demonstrative evidence, that shall do away with 
doubt, and place materialization above the fraudulency 
of these exposing times. Every advent of Spiritualiza- 
tion, or Spiritualism, has had truth for an usher, so 
much of truth as compatible with the ideal growth of 
human kind, and" to-day the mind force of the whole 
world is drawing around this center figure that has fed 
the creedal world since the Hindoo mythology found 
strength in symboled signs, and since theology has been 
the fashion-plate, from which the world has reared its 
Christian arbitration, and still the cry is forms. The 
world is not done yet crying for materiality — crying 
for the spirit manifested in outer signs,, and in the 
flesh, crying for a holocaust of truth that shall dampen 
the toadyism confined in the whole system of church 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 11 

anarchy, that is criminal before God, and is a slave 
owner of men and women. 

The world's cry is still materiality ! materiality ! to 
crown the returned spirit, to make heaven and earth on 
terms of union footing, and give orthodoxy a hunch she 
will feel in every joint of her crumbling architecture, 
and finally go down in the dead sea of the world's 
ignorance. 

The lessons of the ages have a broad sound, a travel- 
ling back expression, a dipping in all the waters of the 
past to find the evidence of man's faith in God, and 
faith in the immortality of the soul, as a truthful struc- 
ture, embodying the principles to maintain individual 
sequence before the bar of infinite progress. 

The world has always had its system of religious 
worship, from the Zendavesta of the Persians, from 
Buddha's heathen hieroglyphic gods, and structures 
of mundane objects, supposed to possess some recant- 
ation virtue with Deity from the Romish divinity of 
passional greatness, symboled and confined in the pow- 
ers given in wood and stone, in priestcraft, and in the 
idolatry of pomp and show. In all the vast regions of 
the mighty past, farther back than man knows for, have 
the principles of religion been forstered and held by 
such faith as comported with the world's spiritual 
growth and education. 

Mind has ever had its grasp on Deity, and has ever 



12 TEE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

sought a system whereby to express recognition and 
fellowship with the infinity stamped upon his mind, and 
merged in every part of his being, and yet held aloft as 
the Father and Ruler over all existant life. Protestantism 
is as far back as mind cares to linger, but its sweeping 
folds still trail over the alters of Catholicism, that can 
never clear herself from Romanism, the babbling foun- 
tain that contains the spittle that has inoculated the 
creed-bound world, and given religion the glittering 
finish of being sold for so much a drachm. Romanism 
can never clear herself from the jupe of Zorasteric 
reign. The connecting links of all the monuments of 
religious show are as clearly defined in the mental 
histories of the past and present time, as Darwin's 
process of dovetailing all the species of animal life into 
one rythmic verse to produce man. 

Every age carries its weapon of Christianity to place 
at the hand and heart of Deity, and its acceptance has 
been in accord with its lasting virtue, as seen in the 
perfecting of humanity. 

The lessons of the ages, in the present writing will 
not so much embrace the historical facts of the past 
fundamental worship-ground connecting God and man, 
in a labyrinth of mystery and materiality that belongs 
to the darkened condition of their respective age and 
time. These lessons will take a broader scope in ethical 
science, in past and present gradations of mind achieve- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 13 

ments, or purposes, guiding or leading on to achieve- 
ments. The world has ever drank to drunkeness of 
every fountain, having a showy placard announcing its 
whereabouts, and where with all to feed the stomach or 
mind of man ; and the fountain serving its purpose has 
dropped apart, leaving the truth it contained feeding 
many channels, to irrigate a broader landscape of dom- 
inant power. 

Christ stood witness eighteen hundred years ago, at 
the temple of spiritual knowledge, and besought man to 
search for the right key to unlock that feasible temple, 
when earth could no longer hold together the shadow of 
outward seeming. And ages before Christ the love 
messengers instituted a wider search for a religion, that 
would grace the inner temple of man and woman, as 
well with ihe shamrock of ever increasing verdure and 
beauty, that death could have no power to destroy. 
Heathen history served for a time. The Jesuitical sal- 
vage only pre-empts for a season. The Cathedral of 
unlimited sway has never been builded. No theories, 
or system of theories, can stand under a progres- 
sive unfolding of mind in matter. Old dynasties of 
pomp and unmitigated wrong and cruelty of design and 
purpose, have dwindled away before the sunlight of a 
more Godly education, that could not tolerate the vast- 
ness of heathen ignorance and cruelty, unless staid, 
would render God a nuisance whose power all had a 



14 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

right to question, and all had a right to combine in pur- 
pose to make God better, or make men to understand 
God better. 

Theories have never stood the test of religion, be- 
cause theories only satisfied in a measure the outside 
plan of life, while religion is a fundamental principle 
inlaid in God, and followed out through all the inverse 
tide of human nature, and therefore Theocratic history 
has run stale and barren of good, while religion has 
handled the white nectar of peace since time boasted 
of man, and man realized inate sensitiveness, which 
has ever reached for better things in accordance with 
the unfolding of spiritual law, which law is integral 
action, controlled by no force, but eliminated and per- 
fected by concordant design in the atomic realms of 
space. 

Spiritual law is older than God, because anterior to 
mind as an element of supreme power. Mind is a 
thinking apparatus, dependent on outward expression, or 
symboled form, to educe growth and consequent action, 
while the spiritual law that radiates from centre to cir- 
cumference, and holds nature for mind to grasp at will, 
is the volition encased in fire and water, capable of pro- 
duciLg thought, and therefore anterior to the circum- 
scribed position of thought. Thought dwells in evolu- 
tion, and is rounded out from her broad lap of 
indulgence, while spiritual law is evolution itself, or, 



THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 15 

in other words, is the ever-producing or unfolding 
agency, that is a cause without limit, a preponderating 
inflow and outflow of gasous fluid, self immolated, or 
inducted in fire and water, that girdles all space with a 
power of cohesion that mind has never meddled with. 
Mind is an outgrowth from the workings of spiritual 
law, never yet having consolidated to a system of 
thought that could not be impeached by some other 
thought, which shapes its dependency at once, showing 
conclusively there must be a law superior to any range 
of thought yet discovered. 

If God is a thinking power, holding the vastness of 
space in any logical manner that the world can educe 
geometrical design from, and an equilibrium in all the 
forces of gestative nature, if thought can hold system- 
atically so broad a schism apart from the just and 
forcible law in primated matter from the friction forces 
of light and heat, or fire and water, having nebulous 
design, why then, thought bound and controlled in the 
one Godhead of supernal philosophy is yet awaiting 
discovery, from lesser minds, intent on probing this 
grand equation of mental calibre, that has stood 
through all the lessons of the ages, a ghost haunting 
the infidelity of man, and only awaiting a spiritual 
discovery to become a law-abiding god, that no thought 
can distrust outside of molar action. 

We, in spirit life, term God the incarnation of mind 



16 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

in matter ; the spirit going before a purpose. The law 
of progress evolving a solution that time must deal 
with according to her capacity of spiritual attainment. 
The law of evolution primated in matter has evolved 
our heavenly God, that must clasp hands with science, 
becoming one under the law of solar equation. Mind 
outside of matter can divulge nothing, but as an out- 
growth from the conjunctive elements in matter, acted 
upon from atmospheric condensation, is sure to reveal 
everything respecting our epitome God. God cradled 
in the lap of solar indulgence is an infant at play with 
its mother's apron strings, but God, as an elimination 
of mind force from the body system of opaque space, 
is the world's plummet for sounding the viscera of all 
natural design. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 17 



CHAPTER II. 

YOU see, my earth friends, the sooner you let go 
of your dogmatic God-head the sooner will the 
true revelater attach itself to your creed of intellectual 
feelers. All system has had God for a mouth-piece to 
blow its horn of merit. All philosophers have found 
basic installments in God. Few have thought to reach 
farther in illimitable space than the supposed man 
figure of supernatural wisdom and power of design, 
because man's nature is to cope with man. The ul- 
terior forces in matter, or in nature containing the seed 
time and harvest of every functional atom, bearing date 
of conceivement, man has treated in a desultory and 
unfaithful manner, for it requires thought intense and 
strong to search for life, for individuality, and for a 
purpose connecting those two monuments of suppressed 
power, life and individuality. It requires intense activity 
of the mind to go outside of our repeated God, and 
find a basic structure for all life, for all activity, for all 
conceivement and all achivement, for all growth of 
mind and matter, for the rosy and the thorny side of 
every day's beat of time, for all there is of God in his- 
tory, or in the broad Thesis of nature's designs, that is 



18 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

caught and caged somewhere by one vast ripple of love, 
whose key-note of virbration reaches from centre to 
circumference, holding God in the folds of evolution, 
and man in the same channels of evolving light, to be- 
come perfect when God is perfect. 

I say it requires such method of thought as mind on 
earth has not grown to. To step back of God as a 
supreme revelator and find the forces of life fixed, and 
held by cohesive laws that God could not meddle with, 
God being the radiation of mind from the working or 
reflex of those laws. Minds of earth have been quite 
content with the God of fabled history. It is easier to 
take pills when we know that some one else has been 
dosed with them and claimed relief therefrom ; much 
easier to try what has been tried as a mental or phy- 
sical panacea than to break over old rules and forms 
and plunge for something undiscovered that holds a 
point of trust that must satisfy every investigator, how- 
ever skeptical, in their out-reach after knowledge based 
in facts. It pays one to travel, whether it be with the 
mind let loose for a theological tramp mid the dry 
bones of ancient technology or for the body's ease and 
gratification that takes something new to its house of 
clay, and casts away something it has no further use 
for. Mind governs the body, and both are partners 
for the reception of good, or the reverse, as experiences 
meet the two natures. What we grow from is as neces- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 19 

sary to be understood to bring compass to natural 
design, as it is to know whither we are tending and 
to what forces we are to beat against in the future 
tense of time, if we are yet to face God in any other 
way than by thoroughly mingling in all the varieties of 
materialistic nature. We never speak without express- 
ing a design, without showing the God-mark of our 
construction ; we never move in any way but we 
show the whole equator of design. We show the power 
of mind expressed in matter, we show the God within 
us, dealing with the combination of chemical results, 
from the friction rasp of light and heat. Every typical 
expression of nature thrown out on base endeavor that 
meets and mingles with the occult springs that out- 
stamp our type of expression, are the result of chemical 
action inborn in gaseous fluids that have wrought to- 
gether to the unfoldment of God in nature or mind in 
matter, simplyfying what heathenism made blind and 
obscure. 

To-day we are travelling out into the realm of chemi- 
cal action. Past history teaches of the mind's enslave- 
ment, of Greek meeting Greek on the bended knee of 
fear, with judgment warped and set to dry beside the 
holy Church of the living God, remote from any con- 
ception of science, .remote from any breath of fractional 
or sectional life but what was rounded out and clasped 
by the hand of God in church and creed. Enslave the 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 



mind and where and what is God ? A school boy at 
play with a chip house, or a supernatural being living 
in a fleecy heaven without top or bottom of any known 
substance, where the righteous will find firm foundation 
without fear or trembling of ever coming in contact 
with a lake of fire that is ever kept burning for the sin- 
sick and weary ones of earth. O ignorance ! thy birth- 
right gift is foolishness ! is a label of dogmatism and 
scintillating wickedness, more fearful than the hell of 
thy brimstone coloring, more fearful than tar or 
feathes, ax, halter, or gibbet, press, pulpit or Com- 
stock's free pilfering of rights ; for these etceteras are 
thy offerings and cannot harm a soul, bordered by the 
sunlight of God's evolving truths. 

Touch but a key of the world's grandest organ and 
the whole vibratory system of music is felt by the soul, 
attuned to the harmony of sound — touch this grand 
system of evolution and the thinking mind is immolated 
on the shrine of duty, from which out-flows the har- 
mony that angels are voicing heaven with, and sending 
the glorious refrain to the free-thinkers of earth. 

Free thought, riding on the shoulders of our old the- 
ology, is like the glitter of a new buckle on an old 
shoe, or a new harness on the family horse that has 
out-lived its service. Free thought ! Why it is God's 
right shoulder moving the wheels of progress, and 
sooner or later the sword shall be turned into pruning 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 21 

hooks, and man's church shall be the inner temple, 
from which has grown the best thought and the best 
endeavor to rear a system where love shall supersede 
and destroy the vulgar use of money. Money to-day 
is the autocrat that swamps the soul and deadens the 
nerve force of humanity to be noble and just to each 
other — to live and let others live also, to deal in the 
spirit knowing that the spirit finds us out, and reports 
to the surface shadow ever in attendance when we do 
an unjust or unholy act. 

In the passing of time old theories are swept away, 
become obsolete, out of date and consequent use. In 
the passing of time we also see the newer utterings of 
wisdom manifested in the attestability of science to 
clear away the imperfect issues surrounding man's 
accountable nature. 

Man grows from transverse position from two 
accountable pulsations of life and motion. Force is 
always the agent of control, whether it be with good 
intent or a motor put forth with illegitimate purpose, it 
is creative principle under the sway or banner of Al- 
mighty science inducted to the centre of negative 
design. The same power or force that placed this 
earth in the orbit of motion places a baby on the 
rostrum of a living entity — places a star in the mid- 
night grandeur of the heavens, and a pebble on the 
white sanded shores of the wondrous ocean, and places 



22 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

the ocean, with her roaring melody and inflexible water- 
power, a wonderful self-poise of constituent design, in 
a world that has no anterior thought of growth, or per- 
fecting only what comes from the elimination of a more 
rarified force condition, brought about by the mingling 
and comingling of sexual primates in the embryotic 
pulsations of gaseous nature. 

Man learns to think from the force of circumstances, 
and so the material body of this world-orb has grown 
and become thus far perfected from and by this same 
law of circumstances, inlaid in the formula of gaseous 
design, or gaseous instituted power, infiltrated in the 
science of cause and effect. Circumstances govern us 
completely. There is no such thing as pulling up the 
track wherein we are to walk, it having been laid by 
the skilful hand of science. We are adjusted with the 
credentials for its trial and consequent discipline. All 
lives have started from the centre gravity of motion, 
and have perforce a centre law of accountability, which 
is brought to bear in the formation of character, as 
circumstances shape results. There is a continous law 
of change ever working from centre causes, and in- 
dividual life is the apex whereon is placed the index of 
accountability, because matter is in no way accountable 
until punctured by the God-star of reason. 

Nature is ever lifting in her gyrating motion, and 
swells to the full her tremulous tune of visexual pri- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



mates interlacing and folded away in the cunning re- 
treat of abnormal design. Nature never speaks but 
once in building a germ for procreation, one effort of 
magnetic will stamps the life of everything — stamped 
the Caesars with their mighty wealth, and George Wash- 
ington with his free philanthropy of spirit ; stamped 
wars upon the world, and whirlwinds in the heavens, 
rosebuds in thorns, birds in tiny shells, and God in the 
ascendency of nature and design, working out the pre- 
cepts laid in natural law, to the comprehension of 
human minds. 

Forsyth sought God for the knowledge that he could 
attain to, by the close inblending of spirit, that would 
bring him near to purpose, and the ultimate principles 
of progress. Who studies God to-day, with the excep- 
tion of a few church runners, but with the eye of 
faith, with the time-worn goggles hazed over with the 
dusky green to shut away the light embedded in a godly 
Christianity ? whose head and shoulders dip in nature 
continuously, for the fostering hand to support the true 
religion. 

I do not suppose Christ was a church-going man, in 
any sense of the word. I believe the church he labor- 
ed in, and for, was the people's church ; human hearts 
ever held a text for him to enlarge upon, and pour into 
the full orchestra of his grandest love notes, that in the 
symphony and sympathy of appeal, might come resto- 



24 THE LESSORS OF THE AGES. 

ration with new life and consequent hope. Christ was 
a toiler, not for churches and the word, but for people, 
and the spirit. 

I believe that the lessons of the ages taught up to 
Christ's time were lessons of crude materialism, les- 
sons where the soul warbled faintly of heaven. God 
was seen but as a man with huge proportions, with great 
geographical latitude, capable of any immense under- 
taking to show his power and skill to outwit man in 
finite hemispheres. Christ's God was the infinite soul, 
permeating everything, stamped upon human intelli- 
gence, and moving in the crater of human ambition. 
Christ saw God clearly, because he saw himself pure, 
and therefore free to do right, and consequently knew 
that the spiritual man was en rappotw\'d\ the soul of a 
living entity. 

Confucius saw with a living zeal that the whole plat- 
form of Christianity was submerged in the material 
workings of men, that the spirit of the divine word 
cropped out anew in every advance of mind above mat- 
ter. Confucius was as near to Christ as the lessons of 
the ages would admit of, as near to Christ as the God- 
spirit of his nature had advanced in the darkness of his 
time. If Confucius saw God, it was not as Moses saw 
him, in the material sense of view, but with his spirit 
burnished with the aroma of love and goodness. God 
was the principle wherein the world was to dip for every 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 25 

amendment of error and atheistic darkness. Confucius 
was a star in the tideway of human affairs, a lighthouse 
in his age of mind crudeness and Deistic proclivities, 
lighting the way to deeper thought and better action. 
Confucius is the Chinese monument of living strength, 
whose glory has swept through many generations, and 
periods of time ; and no Chinaman to-day but what 
holds the living principles of his reign as a motor with 
God, for redemption and purification ; although their 
foolish idols are the play-boards for feasts and festivals, 
making a show of parliamentary action with their typi- 
cal saviors, who are as mute and silent, as were all the 
gods of heathen history ; who stood sponsor for crimes 
as black as the travestry of error, that has run through 
all the creed-bound systems of religious worship, and 
stepping from the material plank of heathenism, we 
find that Christianity or religion, which is the taper 
lighted from the altar, is scarcely more than the spicing 
to the minister's cake; which can scarcely be called 
food to allay hunger, but simply a little ceremonious bit 
to tempt the appetite and tickle the taste for something 
more solid and substantial to build upon for Christ 
and his kingdom. 



26 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER III. 

I SAY to you, my earth friends, that the religion of 
to-day is altogether too showy in its announcements, 
and too aristocratic in its typical expression, to be of 
much use to a famishing soul, hungry for the true bread 
to succor the love principle that has actuated every 
martyr, of every age and clime ; and those martyrs 
have, in most cases, stood out from church and creed, 
and battled face to face with this principle of right, im- 
bedded in the soul, and transfigured in action upon the 
living scroll of a nation's honor. 

It is not the churches that have done the weeding 
for the world's progress and advancement in spiritual- 
ity ; but it has been individuals, single handed and 
alone, who have fought our greatest battles, whose spirits 
of wisdom have more thoroughly permeated the godly 
anarchy of rule, than any combined force of Christian 
creed ever stamped upon the world. Where is there a 
church to-day asking for redemption from sin and 
slavery, that wields a force in its combined strength for 
spiritual help in its hour of need, as did our Whittier 
when the throbs of his soul went out in verse for the 
liberty of three million slaves ? What said our churches 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 27 

then ? Why, that liberty must be gagged, too much 
frontal show would displace their kingdom of policy, 
which was to cramp where it would not do to enlighten, 
but Whittier's heart-sob pierced the multitude, and 
spirit took action. Men saw God in the work, and God 
saw Abraham Lincoln would wring the serpent's neck 
by his stamp act of emancipation. 

Have the churches, go as far back as Ninevah you 
please, ever done so grand a thing ? ever careened so 
much to the right, as to speak a hope as bright and 
saving in its tendency as the word Liberty to the bond- 
men at the south ? Search every record of creed-bound 
religion, every sophistry of pulpit and press, to make 
brilliant her God-face of ordination, and you will surely 
fail to find in all of her broad territory an act or deed 
more worthy of God's acceptance and approval. 

Religion is more mighty to-day than ever before, be- 
cause it is better understood what constitutes her power 
and worth. If I say I am a religionist, let my acts 
every day of my life confirm my saying to be true ; let 
me look continuously if I will to heaven, for aid to 
strengthen my purpose of right ; but let me also look 
in the world for her objects and aims, on which my re- 
ligion may show in good results. 

Ministers tell us we are all in hell until we are con- 
firmed and set to brew in their oven of safety, that opens 
and shuts with the apostolic certainty of having secured 



28 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

an overland traveller for heaven, who has nothing to do 
but to pay tithes, say his prayers, drink holy water if 
the creed demand it, partake of a little white bread to 
soothe the atonement, and feel scot free of sin, at peace 
with God, with a side wink at the devil, saying, you, I 
have outwitted by paying so much a year into this holy 
temple, and submitting to a few Christian et ceteras, 
which custom demands and age has withered. 

The devil never worked to any better advantage to 
promote his territory of reign than in the churches, by 
cramping the soul to fit a creed. My soul has fought 
the sternest battles with that wide-mouthed Apollo of 
power, that has sapped the life-blood of Christianity, 
to swell the papal crown of influence and deepen the 
spirit of mammon, about the whole ecclesiastical step- 
board of religious show ; and I am free to say, that the 
pulling down of creed will lead to universal freedom 
and communion with the angel world. 

So much I have said as a preface, before enlarging 
upon the nature of ethical religion, as based in science, 
and carried out in the philosophy of natural law. Sci- 
ence is a word greatly used, but its point of illumina- 
tion has scarcely been touched ; and its meaning with 
regard to life and death is yet merged in darkness, and 
no Plutonian school of past or present scholarship has, 
or can fathom its depths of meaning or light of life. 

Plato was very learned from the intuition of his soul. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES 29 

God took root in creative science, and would be a last- 
ing teacher, so long as the spirit of progress fronted 
the atheism of all coming time; but Plato, deep as he 
was in the true solvents to a practical religion, did not 
see that ethical science, understood and lived, would 
stamp the world with a religion that angels could trav- 
erse, thus bridging the spiritual and material continent 
with an unending method of communication. Plato, 
who comes before us to-day, comes as a mighty ray of 
the past, so far back that it scarcely seems to be our 
world that produced that living anchor to a Godly hope. 
Is it a supposable case, that Plato has become extinct ? 
that the fire that lighted his soul has burned to dross ? 
the genius of the world's greatest orator, whose sayings 
are chiseled in God, burned into Greek history, and live 
in the spirituality of to-day. The word death does not 
fit to any part of such men's lives, the sweeping fires 
to a greater illumination awaken the soul to a master- 
ship over time, that eternity may cull the living gem, 
whose sparkling brilliancy reaches to God, and claims 
the science and purpose of its power. 

Can death ever reach a Galileo ? ever unite its icy 
fingers with the lustrous crowning of his mighty intel- 
lect ! that could traverse the realms of space, solve the 
equation of stars, fix planets in their orb of circulating 
splendor, and move the world to the study of equatorial 
design ? Such men live for a purpose, and if purpose 



30 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES 

can die, then God, man and nature can die, become 
extinct, become the non-accesor to a single principle of 
filial worth. 

We cannot lose a single orb, be it great or small, in 
the galaxy of human life but what the break would pull 
down center, law and gravity of motion. If death 
could ensue to me — reach my centre compass, destroy 
my equation of manhood — then God comes under the 
same law of deathly destruction, and God and man have 
a beginning and ending. 

The surf upon the sea becomes white by the con- 
tinued lashing of its waters ; and so shall the white 
peace of immortality show brave and clear, when the 
lashings of science has whipped out creed and rent her 
dominant ministers, although they be Spurgeon like, 
outside of their mole-hill churches, to fatten on thought 
instead of popular favor, that tips and bends with a 
rod of gold. 

Dish washing, says Auntie Soul, is a splendid work 
if God unbends and steps to the side-board of duty. 
Thought, I believe, has no regular pew of worship, but 
can solve a problem in algebra, in nature, or in that 
great husk of Noah's Ark that carried so much bullion 
in live stock, when mind dealt in figures instead of 
facts ; as well can the mind study when the fingers shell 
beans as it can under the glory of that old Bible, brewed 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 31 

under the cover of church and creed, with an ecclesias- 
tical whip, lashing to slavery and subdued order. 

Why, friends of earth, I would rather sit under an 
apple tree, famous for its worth of golden fruit, with a 
poem of Leigh Hunt and the last nail of Baxter over 
the doomed condition of man, than to sit in a creed- 
bound church and follow out the meaningless trail by 
which sinners can bear a part in the resurrection, 
reach heaven, sit at the right hand of God, and wave 
their plumes of triumph over the non-converted that 
are in the other valve of secular influence, trying to 
reach the spirit of mercy, but God refuses, because 
they refused or failed to come in contact with the 
church filter. Why ! Baxter's nail is harmony com- 
pared to this seething foam of churchly Christianity, 
presented in golden cups for the nations' respectability 
and glory of Christian enterprise. 

The songs of the angels are nearing the earth, the 
voicing touches to a mighty revolution will make free- 
dom of speech the grand hiatus to the evolvement of 
truth, and immortality will stand face to face with the 
world's bigotry and superstition. 

Robert Ingersoll is playing ball in the old theological 
camping ground of historical romances and God-speak- 
ing wonders, hitting where I dared not touch, because 
sectarianism held closer reign than now, and if I spoke 
at all my voice must be muffled and truths held back, 



32 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES, 

that to have uttered would have freed my soul, and 
made me more worthy of my vocation. Robert Inger- 
soll — I pray for his incoming speeches, pray for his pro- 
longed strength and sufficiency of manhood, that dares to 
utter his truths in the face of the fashionable toadyism 
and bankrupt religion of to-day. The nobility and 
goodness in the man's face is better study than the 
tiicks of Moses, which he has made himself familiar 
with, and by which he masters his audience completely. 
The fun in the man is worth the money he gets for its 
dissemination over the hearts of his hearers ; and I am 
fain to say* I would rather go to his non-committal 
heaven with him, as an usher, than to follow the bee- 
line of modern sectarianism and be seated at last in the 
golden ring of promissory Godism. 

The mingled fables of Antioch could not combine a 
greater fraud to please God and sooth a weakened con- 
science than these ministerial strokes of policy to fatten 
the church camel, whose humps of discord have shown 
through all ages, linked together by spiritual promise, 
shown in the advancement of the arts and sciences — 
nature's grandest themes of worship in the freedom of 
speech that will not be bound in the out-cropping of a 
religion shown in the souls of men and women, who 
cannot be content under prayer, fasting and penance 
under any organized form of worship, but must needs 
show their hand with God — and their hearts in solar 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 33 

light, by trying to prune society of its errors, and make 
a break on the dead sea of materialism, never more 
apparent than now, when ministers are seeking the 
truth of immortality outside of God-written word, 
knowing that the gospel teachings of the Bible cannot 
succor a soul whose idea of heaven is life and action. 
Teach a soul that heaven is one perpetual psalm-ground, 
and God the direct focus of praise and thanksgiving, 
for having saved what is claimed was, and by him cre- 
ated, and you dwarf the soul at once, by making it an 
idol worshipper, as purely legitimate as the Sanhedren 
worshippers of wood and stone. 

It is useless for ministers to try and lead a people, 
unless the people feel they are being led aright, and 
ministers are feeling the dissatisfaction of the people, 
and also their incapacity to lead much longer on the old 
prologue of hell fire as the penalty of sin. Moral 
ethics is coming in on the old line of the Tudor aris- 
tocracy, whose burden of materialism and religious 
crime England still feels, and is trying to cut loose 
from the despotism of such fraudulent powers, under 
the ecclesiastical assumption of God's will and mea- 
sures. Ethical science could find no root to branch 
from when honesty was considered a bore, truth a 
fiction, crime a virtue, that God took heed of with 
willingness and approval to swell the orchestra of 
Catholic favor, settling over the whole government 
of Europe, making a flood of woe more devastating 
and cruel than Noah's flood of mythic history. 



34 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE lessons of the ages will teach us that God never 
rules by force, unless he sees that people having 
eyes to see refuse to see that virtue brings its own re- 
ward, and those having ears to hear refuse to hear the 
rippling tune of love over the booming cannon of op- 
pression. 

What surety have we of life only in the facts of 
science and in those facts we may safely rest everything. 
It has been the willingness of all time to give God 
the credit, and the experience of constructing life and 
governing death, and with that thought and willingness 
people in a measure have rested, seeing God afar off 
on the judgment seat of the world's salvation, and man 
catering thereto under a diplomatic ruling of church 
discipline. 

What evidence have the churches after so long a 
supremacy ? What evidence of the approval of God 
of the after life, through their channel of adoption ? 
None, whatever. It is a supposition of the crudest 
and most irrational view of life, and its characteristical 
signs with God and science. The Deity over first 
motion, first law and its rights. I question the inalien- 
able power to give life, because it cannot be a gift ; it 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 35 

is a design, a flower, that is to be. If cause and effect, 
the God voicing in nature have blended a perfect bud- 
ding, and the will-force of light and heat expand the 
germinal quiver or feotus to its destiny of purpose, how 
irrevelant is Scripture, how unsound its doctrinal points 
galvanized with heathen mystery, stale and unprofitable 
only as the pillars of ignorance and consequent super- 
stition, from which the law of progress or the eliminat- 
ing principle of evolution have removed the mindality 
of to-day. 

I ask in the earnestness of my spirituality if there is 
any good in keeping a fiction at mast head when every 
eye with the focus fire of sense must see the inability 
of its purpose and show ? I trust the world is becom- 
ing strong enough to face heathen mythology with the 
wisdom gained from the repeated tricks of priestcraft 
to tie soul and body to the letter, a wonderful hulk of 
ignorance, instead of the spirit, the illuminating princi- 
ple, which only makes the Bible a readable book, and 
transferable from one epoch of time to another. 

The Zendavesta of the Persians is as good for us to- 
day, as a guide to the spiritual courts of heaven, as the 
Christian Bible — aside from the silver rivulet per- 
meating the valley gorges of Christ's unassuming life 
and unwearied toiling for a heaven based on a funda- 
mental principle of right, in its broadest and most 
spiritual sense. There can be no Bible, no holy writ, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



no God enunciation of righteousness, purity and broad- 
cast virtue, no grander chrism for the world's salvation 
than the flowery bulb of Christly love, never to be ex- 
panded in full until mind grapples science as the 
desideratum of unqualified power. 

We, in our spirituality, acknowledge no power but 
the divine Power, the leading purposes to a grand un- 
foldment in the natural system-house of matter. 

Divinity signifies everlasting purpose, everlasting 
power, derived from the expanding forces of light and 
heat, that are ever bringing to view the genius we attach 
to Diety. There is no Deity of moral ethics that can 
blend deeper in humanity for good, and the perfect 
growth of good, than the far-reaching and systematized 
monition of the purely human and divine Jesus, whose 
out-flowing of spiritual love will galvanize every error 
of life with the beneficence of a lasting regeneration, 
and whoever hearkens for a sound from any church, 
warbling a new religion, will hearken in vain, for a 
better than Christ exemplified, and is sending out in 
every love-note of reform to bless the coming ages, and 
make a stronger peace with God. Christ is for all 
time, for all countries and for all climes, for all re- 
vealed religion, for all mental philosophy, and all 
didactic study, that can make men better, purer and 
wiser. 

Cato dreamed in heaven and fought in hell, dreamed 



TEE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 37 

of the glorious sunlight of God's love pouring out over 
the world, and saw the benighted and selfish condition 
of God's humanity spurning the love-light of spiritual- 
ity, the all of Christ, and all of heaven, for the pottage 
pomp and show of the world's renown for a nucleus of 
time power that heaven can never deal with, for heaven 
is the parallel term with love, and cages nothing but 
purity and peace. 

The world is not ready for heaven ; when it is, heaven 
will be its centre to act from, and hell the fleeing clown 
of selfishness. 

Buddhas' religion was mythical, but it also had a 
grandeur of conception that the ideality of to-day can- 
not fathom. The old world, with its treasured arts and 
neglected sciences, is a rare basin of wealth ; and its 
theological structures, whose domes reach the sky, are 
but the outward expression to the inner grandeur of 
spiritual conceivements. The old world has flooded 
itself with its errors of typical design, which are the 
flaming swords keeping back the true religion of 
Christly import. 

Christ bore his religion within himself, and yielded it 
to suit all times and purpose*. He did not hold it forth 
in the world as a church, from which so many tenets 
could be expelled for as much money taken in. Ah, 
no ! Christ held his religion above board, whatever else 
might sink about the man, that was the casta diva of 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



immortal worth, whose lustre was as imperishable as 
the twinkling brilliancy of the midnight stars. What 
Christ gave to the world was himself, the all he had to 
give the inner temple for the world to enlarge upon, 
and make better if it could. 

God is a sphere within the immortality of a broad 
and wonderful design, whose compass no mind can 
span, or even touch the foot-board of the wonderful 
conceivement power in science. Mind can only hold 
science to the depth of its cultured and spiritualized 
shaping or condition ; and it is therefore necessary for 
mind to enlarge in the spaces of infinity, that God may 
be understood, and nature grow into the compass of 
individual worship and protection. 

God never errs because nature is true to her spiritual 
instincts, and builds according to the spiral tendency in 
the feotus of design. 

The earth, world or planet, has had its conceivement 
hour, its father and mother planet or visexigon inter- 
lacing of cosmo adherents, that fashioned and formed 
on the solar key of universal lifehood. This world has 
also had its babyhood, with its infantile experiences in 
fossil, rock, and in the vegetable kingdom has the inner 
germ grown its outward symbol from its best spiritual 
conceivement. I find no world more perfect in its de- 
sign than the world of earth, because it fits the cubic 
root of science in every formative principle from centre 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 39 

to circumference, and is as true to the mind force of 
design in one stage of development and growth as in 
another. 

The worlds or spheres, that are termed more spirit- 
ual, are only so from the more ethereal or sublimated 
condition of science, in its natural elongation, from the 
process of blending and inter-blending of the rarified 
selection of mind encased in the armory of science, 
and when understood and breathed upon by the best 
breath of adherent qualification, why, a broader type of 
chemical and therefore spiritual condition ensues, and 
man and his sphere is enlarged, and become an infinite 
soul together, and one through the process of time and 
eternity, if there is a difference that is countable and 
in the arc of solar wisdom. 

Etherealization takes place when motive power is 
ready to face the Deism of purity, that finds no shack- 
els in the way of growth, because conscience speaks 
her mission to serve for the highest attainable point of 
God witnessing and God approvement of action ; then 
comes justification through the law of moral purifica- 
tion. 

Spirit life is emblematical of the highest type of ex- 
istent being, and its gradations occur according to its 
sphere of action. We see the gradations of spiritual 
life in all of the earthly spheroid of motion and ac- 
countable design ; we see gross conditions under the 



40 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

same solar law of indulgence, that we see purity ex- 
pressed and lived beside the shekinah of a more spirit- 
ual unfolding. 

Nature never errs, her facts are every time soluble to 
reason, when reason lets go of the snorting horse of 
creed, and attaches its limner of versatile thought to 
the open sesama of Godly science. Nature is ever con- 
versant with God, ever saying : I hold myself under, 
above, and around the law of progress. I hold myself 
to no creed, but one of universal factorship. Universal 
primates rule my order of design, universal feelers 
shape my course of action, and universal God-ism 
crowns every effort of my triune cause. Nature is 
girded in the armor of a prince, and defies any ancestor 
to wheel a great chair over her claim, with any proto- 
listic benefit derived from claimship. 

All authors have seen nature through a glass darkly, 
not comprehending her internal melody on executive 
workmanship — not understanding her God and Devil 
in hand to hand effort to fulminate a picture where 
every rift, sunshine and shade, shall so speak and 
blend, that no critic could be found to find a fault with 
the conceivement process. All authors have given from 
the full of their comprehended knowledge, and one and 
all have felt the drain, and also the inability to feed the 
multitude with that degree of success that the author 
could say, " I have found the pearl of great price, that 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 41 

will satisfy the capacity of the present and future con- 
tingencies of mental research." 

Mind first grasps the rudimental, and then comes a 
deeper working in the concrete, until it would seem 
that what has been termed chaos, or chaotic condition, 
is fine order, transferred to the mind and consequently 
to the understanding, by the subtle alchemy that unites 
mind to all that nature contains, from her base to the 
rounded structure of her highest God. 

Order was always existent, being the first law from 
which sprang motion. Order is the rivet that fastens 
cause and effect, and making the triune God on basic 
condition ; but behind cause and effect is the instellar 
key, that unlocks the fluidic wells, containing the gase- 
ous solvents that make motion possible, and in the 
hand of Godly sway. 

From the world of spirit and the world of matter, 
conjointly one, will the mysteries of world building be 
made plain to the reasoning faculties of men and 
women ; because mind must fathom the depths of its 
equation, fixed as it is in the centre house of design, 
and budding and flowering in all the occult forces of 
nature. Destiny is man's guide-board, and he cannot 
run counter to it, for results follow causes as surely as 
the law of gravitation masters the world, and hangs her 
flag of truce on the winds of freedom. 

Shelley, the world's hero on limitation, spanned a 



42 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

broader design in compass and range, in the idyl or 
spiritual relationship of being and knowing, than any 
poet scribe of ancient or modern time ; his genius was 
ever lighted at the altar fire of sacrifice, and so the 
whole tone-centre of the man became free from dross, 
and ever broadening on spiritual territory. Because he 
sought for spiritual harmonies, and knew that in the 
broad conclave of natural science that God was but the 
crowning principle or soul-light over all of Ethiopean 
condition, and as God was in the beginning staid and 
true. Shelley mounted the rostrum of free thought to 
find the truth, and the way in and to first principles. 
What God has joined together cannot be put asunder, 
and is marriage contract of the first degree ; migrations 
may occur, but Shelley found, that true as the needle 
to the pole, would the law of attraction bring together 
harmonies ; and disintegration and decay would be the 
result of unsocial centre law. The law of gravitation, 
that holds worlds suspended by the quivering thread of 
conjugal love or attraction, is no more paramount and 
certain in result and effects in that capacity of employ- 
ment, than in holding each atom bearing constructive 
genius to the orbit of natural design. It would cost 
God just as much to lose a pebble from the seashore, a 
grain of sand from the ocean's level, a red leaf from 
old autumn's flowering trees, as it would to say goodbye 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 43 

to a world in motion, for if anything could be lost, 
there is no safety fund in God. 

The lessons of the ages have taught men and women 
to grow fitly to nature, and as nature is ever coursing 
upward, the springs of human achievements are becom- 
ing spiritualized and also galvanized with the true spirit 
of progress ; and from the old dutch oven to bake in, 
we have baking done by gasometers that seem almost 
as ethereal as canary on toast, or nectar from the bill 
of a humming bird. This may seem like a simple 
digression from the theme before us, but for illustration 
we can descend from a world to a mouse, and make 
sober and true meaning. 

The Jews fought for power, fought with the devil of 
monopoly, to foster a ring, wherein God could send a 
Savior especially Jewish and bearing all the credentials 
of worldly pomp and show. The Jews catered to 
Babylon, catered to the mundane philosophy of wealth, 
that God must be en rapport with money, because its orb 
of show was altogether lovely and pleasing, around 
every earthly condition. God to the Jews was a money 
God, unscrupulous in his management with the world, 
as they were in their deal with each other around any 
board of trade, where principle involved sacrifice. 

I now see from my broader light that God lives to 
every nation, in the nation's highest soul condition. 
The Scandinavians were fetish in their worship, heaven 



44 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

with that sorrowful tribe had earth for a base-board to 
lean upon, and the things of earth swamped them com- 
pletely. 

The Hindoo mythology was wrought from carnal 
condition. Persian history is a blank to the spirit of 
the living God. Heathen ministrations will last as long 
as principle succumbs to motive, and God is seen in 
the floating ambitions of men, or in the topmost wave 
of heavenly grandeur, unmindful of the wrongs and 
corruptions of earth; and Satan comes to the front as 
a guest, easy of entertainment, willing to stay, and 
freely kept in a world whose policies are as deadening 
to virtue, the breast-plate worn by the Gods, as the 
sting of the asp is a deadening virus to the citidel of 
human life. 

Monarchies have reeled and fallen under the sicken- 
ing stench of a personal God, who crowned every mon- 
eyed effort, of a moneyed nation, with that degree of 
pomp and cruelty that made terror the boon of life, 
and materialism the carnal religion of the day. Crecian 
captivity was but the manifestation of a powerful God, 
whose weapon was the blood thirsting heart of the na- 
tion, to make ruin and subjugation, where God had 
failed to put the stamp of a moneyed monopoly. 

God will always grow with the growth and intelli- 
gence of the people. To-day sacerdotal history cannot 
feed the mind with a just conception of Deity, for Deity 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 45 

at this stage of mind development is justice from cen- 
tre to circumference of every intelligent force, bearing 
the stamp mark of Godly equation. 

Pollock's Course of Time was a graded constellation 
whose bursting power proclaimed the wrath of an angry 
God, proclaimed a benediction from the flood-gates of 
hell, to swamp the sinner in the pit of endless torment, 
ever burning on the haphazard side of God's fluctuating 
purposes. Pollock wrote under the banner of an angry 
personal God, wrote from the tideway of a superstitious 
intellect, covered with the black cap of materialism 
that failed to let in a ray of science. Pagan idolatry 
was fast crowning the world with a harp of a thousand 
strings drawn through the centre of creedal religion, 
which means religion by the plummet and rule of 
church democracy, kept in running order by the labeled 
word of God, and the open purses of a class of people 
who take better to religion on a server, under the aus- 
pices of regal show, than they would a working out of 
the bright jewel through the fiery furnace of earthy 
discipline. 

Pagan idolatry was waving her crown loftily, and 
materialism was floundering to the surface in squadrons 
of free thought disciples, when a rap came into the 
midnight camp of idolatry and atheistic proclivities of 
thought, to awaken a search on broader territory, where 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



science should show her face, and God could speak 
through the voices of the dead. 

The first rap at Rochester saved the world from 
Deism, saved God in the bond of love, and Christ in 
the rightful capacity as a man medium, born under the 
same law of science that all are born, having no heav- 
enly power only what came from the purity of his 
purposes and acts in his deal with earthly conditions. 
Christ never proposed to save the world only by the 
out-wrought influence of a true and righteous life : — 
follow me, was saying : indorse my principles, if ye 
would live for spiritual things, and receive spiritual 
help, for my Father never refuses those who rap on the 
right door of heaven's sanctuary. We bless the in- 
coming tide of earthly saviors, the incoming tide of 
scientific facts that will brace individuals to save them- 
selves through the insular law of spiritual detective- 
ness. 

I question if there was ever a person, of able-mind 
ambition, that felt satisfied with the atonement process 
of salvation ; it seems too much like shirking our God 
and devil responsibilities, and laying our characters 
away in the orthodox heaven to get lean on the fluted 
flummery of: Thus saith the Lord, handed round through 
the lip service and policies of men, who learn to read 
God's thoughts and purposes in the theology of an 
unscrupulous money democracy. I say away with 



THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 47 

these rasping cudgels of church and creed, that deaden 
all insight into the spiritual harmonies of scientific 
workmanship, based in nature and her God. I say 
away with religion on stilts, seeking from its uplift how 
many it can surround, and place in the ring of God's 
acceptance. Away with our false theocracy that made 
a God out of nothing, and gave him power over heaven 
and earth — a masculine God of course — subject to 
fits and spasms, and frequent discussions with the devil, 
to learn the best method of carrying a world that was 
continually troubling him by the unfaithful results of 
his advices. 



48 TEE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER V. 

YOU see, my friends of earth, that the base struc- 
ture of our theological God could not stand the 
wear and tear of the Christian religion, So many 
devil meetings broke the ring of confidence, and God 
seemed to lose caste as a competent and advisable 
ruler with a class of people that had two-story heads. 
Let us take God naturally ; no other way can serve us, 
because no other God fits cause and effect, and no 
other God can solve to us the problem of life and 
death. We grow from base design, and we accumulate 
so much of God as we can contain day by day, and 
hold it in the world as staple fund for future use. 

To-day finds me in possession of a larger God than 
when time held me bound in my earthly casket, and 
this, now in space, and now in God, is grander than 
anything earth can conceive of ; it is to see my past 
lessons hung on the broad tree of life, and moral ethics 
holding a golden pointer to every thought and its effect. 

I see at the time of my life, where I searched the 
bible to find a God I could endorse with every upright 
principle of my being, was the darkest period of my exis- 
tance, and my God within said and the pointer found 
it : " Theodore Parker, sow your theological seed if 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 49 

you will, but find my correspondency in nature." And 
I find that God in me is God in nature, eliminated and 
prolonged by culture and a widening understanding of 
progressive law, where harmonies meet and mingle for 
the reincarnation of a broader divine purpose. 

Nature is the highest type we have of divine excel- 
lence, for nature always crowns herself and wears her 
crown with the true elegance of non-assumption. We 
grow deeper in God when we understand the polemic 
theory of nature's inverse condition, when we under- 
stand how light and heat are formed, and their con- 
tinuous struggles to farther manifest in nature's desing- 
ihg. We will understand why God is spirit lightening 
up every material compressment with the instinct of 
growth. I shall sing jubilanti when my inverse God 
shall find the completement of one star in the corres- 
pondency of nature's light-house, and give me the effi- 
cient power to solve its glittering finish. Can God, in 
the travestus of solar atmosphere, know more than to 
know the process of world-building and growing ? know 
more than I am capable of knowing when this universal 
God meets in equilibrium the height of my divine or 
love nature. Love is solar hemisphere ; love crowns 
us with wisdom ; love causes me to feel the growing 
God with me, that I am to be ever capable, because 
love is infinite in capacity, surrounding in process, and 
all holy in effort. I ask no brighter crown than one 



50 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

made so by the expanding of my love nature. I ask 
no brighter jewel than a heart made happy by my pres- 
ence, for therein I know a world has been touched and 
my own life carrying the acme of a grander purpose. 

Saul of Tarsus preached and prayed for a divine 
mission in, and of, the world, wholly capsized in 
material pomp and power ; because God to the Tarsus 
king was a man flllibuster in heaven, recruiting on 
eanh, to establish a monarchy, where kings could snuff 
the air of heaven through the nostrils of national sub- 
jection. Saul, while on earth, always found God 
through the devil's causeway, and never appealed in 
God direction, only through his policy God within. I 
find that the God man carries within, never wars with 
the one outside. First purify, and then magnify by 
cultivation your own God of conscience, and you will 
ever harmonize with good wherever found, and with 
God as the centre figure of elongated principle. What 
I am, here and now, progress has made me ; day by 
day have I drank from life's perpetual fountain cf 
knowledge. Whatever has been my work in hand ser- 
vice, or footstep mission, my mind has been the active 
monitor that gathered up the prizes and laid them in 
the storehouse of memory, to round out my self-hood. 
I never fought while on earth with anything so tantaliz- 
ing and perverse to reason as the lame old hen of the- 
ological assumption, setting on the nest-egg of heathen 



THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 51 

Christianity, if we can call form service Christianity, 
and believe that the voice of the living God proclaimed 
wars, and system of wars, proclaimed that the heart of 
the nations might be sheathed in cases of steel, to 
glitter with the cold selfishness of a mammon God 
within, and a mammon God at the battle door of 
heaven. I have always fought Theocratic religion, 
termed Christianity, fought it with my search-warrant 
of reason, until the tail is in sight in the form of the 
Young Men's Christian Association, which will run a 
thorough leak on the old dogmatic Godism. And I 
now see, with my reason top-lighted, that the children 
of to-day will be men and women of a living religion, 
and Christianity will embody the spirit of the living 
Christ, and his blood panacea will be the dead shuck 
of renunciation, that can never hold another straw of 
promise in a world where free thought is the life of 
progress, and in a world that the angels are traversing, 
holding the law and the promise secure in the bond- 
house of science. The Bible is a frail barque to rest 
our future keepsakes on, or in. Give me a life and 
death in motion, a God, in the equation of central 
design, firm to every part of my being, that cannot let 
go, sin or no sin, that cannot look back with a shadow 
of regret, but ever leading me out to the understanding 
of the fundamental principles, attaching to my birth- 
right gift of life proper and in the scales of human 
progress. 



52 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

I have no objection to the Bible, only as a book pro- 
pelled by the sentiments of a personal God, as a book 
for mankind to rest a hope on, in regard to future 
saving. God implies attributes, and can a belief in 
attributes turn one scale in God's favor? Can fear 
promote one inch of my growth mentally or morally ? 
Can hope blend one shade with faith to open the func- 
tion of divine hearing and restore me from sin to the 
mercy seat of salvation, and make me a whole and 
complete man? I accept no salvation, only what 
comes from inbedded principle in the science of moral 
ethics, leaving me free to find its channel, and apply 
its lessons to my daily experiences. Functional life is 
a life within the law ; and I make out with observation, 
united with reason, that law is everything. Let those 
who will call law God, it makes no difference. We are 
as capable in birth, and every change under one term 
as the other. Some, no doubt, will call me an atheist 
in my spirit home, having found that hell, that was pre- 
dicted for me ; but here, and now, my atheism, if you 
will, wears the living crown to a godly principle, perfect 
in the law of science, whether that principle be inlaid in 
the function-house of matter or in the reasoning and 
spiritual forces of heart and brain ; there is no separa- 
tion, because mind claims protection from that God of 
of which it is a part, a limb from the tree or law of 
elongated primates. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 53 

Schiller tells me that his life, so far, has been a poem 
of rare beauty, for everything that the world would call 
stern prose, he, with his spiritual key, unlocked the 
hard surrounding, and his idyl prose stood clothed in a 
poem of functional truth. 

I am glad that I am under a law that will fit me to 
every condition that belongs to me ; glad that my God 
is larger than the one-handed power that catered to the 
Jews, glad that my God lingers long by the fountain of 
ethics in moral phrase, and in the soul-house of nature's 
divinest revelations ; for I know that as I have lived 
through the great change called death, I shall always 
live in my centre gravity condition, and nearer my God 
to thee in every harmonical advance of progressive 
free thought. 

I would not linger beside a stream filled with drift- 
wood, that there might be good in, if cleared from 
rubbish, unless I took off my gloves, if I had them on, 
and my boots, if they impeded my progress in clearing 
the stream of its unnecessary bulk of waste material. 
And so with the Jesuit Bible ; I cannot linger idly beside 
it ; I must work with reason unbound and cleared by 
the fresh wind of free thought, knowing that the living 
stream of Christly love, cleared from heathen rubbish, 
and photographed in the world, where deeds fill the law 
and the gospel, will be all that is needed to make peace 
with God and good will on earth. 



54 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 

I feel like saying Amen to my own inspiration that 
lifts me above the surface of things, to find a remedy 
to better surface condition, and bring down our heaven- 
ly God, into actual life, to establish in finance, and in 
evey department of national business capacity, that code 
of laws where love shall hold the balance weight, and 
Christ, if you will, to formulate the figurehead of jus- 
tice. 

Minds that have unwound from the wheel of pro- 
gress, look upon life as too sacred a boon to be wasted 
in mastering the problems of Noah, Ham and Japhet, 
Isaiah, Moses or Shadrach, or even trying to attach a 
suction quill to the dead hulk of God's crucified Savior, 
the form of Bible theology. God is better understood 
to-day than ever before. Progress has unfolded mind 
to look for principle, for strata security in building 
process, and God cannot escape the investigating 
spirit of man, for divine council is, to search and ye 
shall find that spirit is the light governing the world, 
and God the promissory figure holding the key of sci- 
ence. Man outwardly lives in an atmosphere of light, 
but in the spirituality of inverse being. The divine 
rays of light and promise do not enter the soul system- 
atically, as the daylight by virtue of order holds us ever 
in the bond of expectation and consequent realization ; 
but we are not to suppose from that fact, that the di- 
vinity of science has failed in concordant design in her 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 55 

inverse law of light and revelation, that fixes us before 
we are, to the great primordial of natural order and 
design. 

Life is an index pointing the way to infinite causes, 
bound by the controlling law of light in the swaying 
atmosphere of heat. We should ever grasp our spirit- 
ual infinity with that surety of truth and knowledge, as 
we grasp the infinity of light that is everywhere sur- 
rounding us, and filling us with that sense of oneness 
with the soul of the infinite God. 

We may close our eyes and the light of immortality 
looks us full in the face ; we cannot gainsay the fact, 
for every nerve is pulsating in light and heat. We see 
God enthroned just as clearly, see the stellar key that 
unlocks the spaces just as accurately, see oceans lull 
and beat, landscapes harmony and adjustability to feel 
the triune cause in man ; see friends at distances far 
away from us ; see humanity's platform of deal quite 
as clearly ; see the full tide beat of affection, and the 
raven wing of discord flapping to action the spirit of 
antagonistic elements ; and finally we see all there is to 
see with the eyes closed, see that nature's God is our 
God, radiating ever in light and heat, touch us day by 
day with the arm of filial promise, made secure in its 
spiritual fitment to every function of our outspoken 
lives, and to the agency always ready to take prece- 



56 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

dence when the lapwing of death embraces the sub- 
stance belonging to earth. 

Oh ! friends of earth, humanity at large, I must come 
to you with this truth, and do you make of it a weapon 
of use, for the enlargement of culture and spiritual un- 
folding, for therein lies the stamen to Godly reality, 
expressed in all things, and rounded out in the solvency 
of etherealized condition or atmosphere. I must come 
with the truth, having tested the reliability of its solu- 
tion thus far to my entire satisfaction. Come now, with 
its white flower of peace hung on the waving branches 
of a complete knowledge, that I must hold before creed, 
synagogue and temple, to confound the substance of 
their teachings, and cause them to see as I now see, 
that God is the emblematical figure to a complete sys- 
tem of ethical and ethereous science, born to the des- 
tiny of motion by convolving evolution. 

There is no death, no change, no flaw, but one 
serene, stupendous law, by which we are as sure of to- 
morrow as to-day, and by which we shall ever be mani- 
fest to the orb of spiritual understanding. And so I 
would say to all the people of earth, that I live in 
spirit life. I have never lived in any other life , that 
tangibility to earthly condition is but the one expression 
of spirit to manifest while to-day or now ; the power of 
the spirit is intensified or elongated, so that I no longer 
wear handcuffs, but can practice my theory to better 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 57 

advantage, and sprout new germs of thought on liberal 
principle, without the fear of being ostracised. 

In a word, my friends, I am Theodore Parker, alive 
and well, unshackeled and free, and I glory in my 
power, which is spirit power to reach you, and make 
known the process of death, that all must pass through 
that are born of the earth. I passed that Rubicon 
safely, was witness of the whole scene, was floating, not 
in the arms of Christ, as the world knew and predicted, 
but in a safety valve, just as safe and sure. The om- 
nipotent ether flow, that buoyed me up, before death's 
icy hand had taken all heat from my body. I do not 
know as all persons pass out that way ; I only speak of 
my own dissolution, that I look upon now as one of the 
many incidents on my journey of life, and from which 
dates broader life, light and knowledge, broader God, 
hope and heaven, broader inverse action, realization, 
and therefore manifestation. Every part of God be- 
longs to me, now as of old, for I have lost nothing but 
have gained much, gained love and respect for my 
teacher, which is experience wearing the golden crown 
of a monarch, leading me on and on to test the worth 
of my being, and the ability of God within, leaving me 
free to cancel my every indebtedness, and feel the full 
measure of my own guilt, which I cannot ask God to 
forgive if I cannot myself approve. And I make bold 
to say, that every true man and woman must of neces- 



58 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

sity feel the same. We cannot deceive ourselves, and 
therefore cannot deceive God, for the Devil, as of old, 
reports correctly, and always conspires to have us own 
our bankrupt condition. Death always finds us in the 
right time ; we cannot doubt the fact with any satisfac- 
tion to ourselves, because in doubting God's system we 
doubt God, leaving us on a basis of chance, without 
guide or rudder. 

We cannot choose our death-hour, neither can we 
govern our birth; both issues are in the control of 
Godly science, that never wavers in duty or design, but 
firm and true to the principles holding control. Death 
is a microscope in which we look through and see the 
enlargement of life and its realities ; see ourselves in 
the equity scales of justice, and no aristocracy of creed, 
caste or color can move in the decalogue of God's favor. 
The process of death commences with our birth. At- 
mospheric pressure carries the power of condensation. 
The infant cannot keep its first wrapping, neither its 
second, or third, and so all along the years of earthly 
life are filled with death or decay ; the terms signify 
the same, and we cannot help ourselves ; the fact is 
intact in nature, and we cannot disturb the equilibrium 
of its motion. Death is as much a portion of God or 
science as life ; we cannot disintegrate the two factions 
of equal merit, that have joined hands in the orbit of 
nature's design. We only perceive life with our sense 



THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 59 

to feel life in all of its bearings, from the raising of an 
arm to the motionary grandeur of an earthquake, or 
the rippling thrill that comes from the expression of 
love and friendship — sure monitors of life and heaven. 
We perceive death with that same sense quickened to 
fortify against it, showing to us conclusively that we 
only antagonize against the body, that our sense to feel 
with the spirit is more acute, more deft to discern the 
death process, which clearly defines itself by the weak- 
ening of functional security. Every thing is a fact in 
its design. The design of death is progress, and pro- 
gress nullifies the term as applied to the spirit. 

The issue of death is life indissoluble, and in the 
compact of never ending of purpose and power of ac- 
complishment. The power to live is greater than the 
power to die, because life is contingent on necessity. 
The necessity for a thing is greater than the thing itself; 
cause is greater than effect, and is always calling for a 
prolongation of effects, that must perforce come under 
the law of give and take. If I give my body, my tene- 
ment of clay, that belongs to time and its conditions, 
whether I do it willingly or not, the law remains the 
same, and necessity is a stern master, and I am forced 
to take my wider experience, as the child is forced from 
A B C to Baker and the problems of Aristotle. Had 
the child died or passed from the body in the A B C of 
advancement, the Ba-ker term was just as much a 



60 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

necessity, to fulfill the law of progress, which never 
goes down, but is ever onward and upward in its tend- 
ency. 

The law of death takes us one step higher from 
bondage or slavery to matter ; takes us into that school 
where we learn primates, where we see the spirit in 
substance, see godly worship of science under the ham- 
mer of nature's divine necessity, see why we die or 
change, for there is no such term as death in reality ; 
see why progress is the standard shield, protecting the 
universe of matter and spirit. 

Spirit is combined gasses. Disintegrate gas and it 
loses its power to act in proper order, therefore a screw 
is loose at the centre of causality, and nature goes 
down for readjustment and broader security or" purpose. 
The spirit world is all about us ; all under the law of 
divine necessity, all under the force power of the living 
God, and we cannot escape its harmonies and inhar- 
monies, which prepare us for universal lifehood. 

I would not escape the destiny of counter currents, 
swaying to action every part of self-immolation, causing 
me to say and to feel that I am but as the one blade of 
grass forming nature, and building God. We are never 
so small as when living for our own elevation, with a 
motive for self-aggrandizement. 

Tennyson, I think, has somewhere said, " Live for 
the good of all, that all may feel the good in thee.' , 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 61 

i 

That sentiment is the expression of God that all do 
feel and reverence, as the living attribute of the all- 
pervading Deity of motion. Dearii can never enter the 
precinct of the living principle of goodness ; it is the 
foundation on which rests the science of immutable 
law. Death is an abstract idea, that cannot be joined 
to a living principle in any secretive sense, however 
vast in its systems of disintegration ; it burrows in its 
own eternal cavity of decay, and all the forces of ether 
light cannot reinstate the fallen casket over which death 
holds its midnight watch. 

All nature is under the law of disintegration. Co- 
operation in gaseous forces necessarily educes elonga- 
ted substances, that are continually being acted upon 
by the counter currents of astronomical science ; and 
what we term death is as much a necessity in the origin 
of nature's divine humanity, as what we term life, that 
looks through each tenement of nature's providing with 
an uplifted self-poise that makes grander life and God; 
grander the system house of principles, because better 
understood and better lived. How can we murmur at 
death, when science shows it to be the open sesame to 
a broader portal of life, never ending but ever pro-, 
gressive, and within the limit of individual selfhood. 

I have never lost my structure of manhood, never 
lost my centre power of action, never lost one iota of 
theological balance power that has ever radiated from 



62 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

the central idea of God, as a universe of primates, in- 
herent in the cosmogony of science, and relatively in- 
clined to everything in nature, which is art, glorified by 
its highest expression of truth. 

As day by day the endless chain 

Of God's eternal law, 
Unwinds in endless beauty 

Wherein is found no flaw. 

I cannot now traverse all of science, and probably 
never can, for God is but an infant in the substance of 
his works, and science educates on the free-masonary 
plan, by letting no more in than can hold reliable 
friendship. 

I ask no greater boon than this : 
To live in God and Science kiss, 
And bow to none that holdeth sway 
But what I can in love obey — 
But what I can with love embrace, 
And meet in friendship face to face. 

If death holds anything of my soul's accountability 
I cannot progress. I cannot harmonize with heaven, 
and there is nothing else to harmonize with, for the law 
that fits us to heaven is the law of progress, ever evolv- 
ing light and truth, and ever satisfying to the soul's 
need. Death never can hold me. I cannot be held to 
quietude of any kind that can shut from me the 
reverberating sounds from off God's altars of pro- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



gressive harmony. I cannot be shut away from sound, 
sight, feeling, tasting, smelling ; all my senses are acute 
to the spirit, and I can never sleep, but in rest and 
peace of soul, with the light of accountability shining 
full in my face, and the sermon on the mount para- 
phrased in all the occult forces of nature, and appeal- 
ing to all of my senses. Sensorium, which is con- 
science, bearing arms to whip out creed, only that 
which can be sustained in the actualities of the love 
principle. 

Christ had no creed but a business creed ; he had no 
heaven only as the resultant effect of the full use of 
his business capacity. Heaven never swamped an idle 
soul ; and Christ found that deeds filled heaven's bill, 
and were ever useful in the crucible of the future. 



64 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER VI. 

WHAT I hold to-day, or now, of spiritual life, 
has always been in my orb of attainment ; 
there is nothing gained, nothing lost. God, or nature, 
is all provident unto the end, meaning the terms of pro- 
gress, and their sufficiency of purpose to maintain 
self hood in a world that is continually repeating itself. 
By the term world, I do not confine the idea to earth, 
but to the harmonical cord in nature that winds its 
golden length through all the vastness of limitation, 
and sounds broader and deeper than minds of earth 
can dream of in the present spiritual unfolding. 

I bless God for the change that took me into broader 
fields of light, nearer the system-house of science, and 
nearer that Deity which my mind always sought and 
felt was somewhere within my reach, somewhere within 
my own being, if I could grow to its attainment, and 
feel secure in its promises. 

We can never reach an outside God until our interior 
God holds out the hand of friendly recognition, and 
saying with the heartiness of soul-wording : " We have 
at length met, at length find we our balance in Thee ; 
at length, oh ! God we find that thou art the mighty 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 65 

channel through which all minds must pass to find the 
rubicond of glory and peace." 

I am glad that spiritualism is crowning herself with 
stability of purpose to work through the sheaf to the 
bright kernel of truth, that says : "I am the resurrec- 
tion and the life." I am so much spirit going out to 
find the greater spirit, of which I am but a component 
part, swaying in the atmosphere of etherialization, 
crowned with the attributes of selfism, which renders 
me free to cage the living God wherever I may find so 
much pf that principle of Godly import as my soul's 
fruition can comprehend, and be satisfied with the 
results. 

I never could grow strong on sweet potatoes, al- 
though at times they are relishable and pleasant to the 
appetite. Neither could the cream of the church fat- 
ten me to any degree of pomposity, although its liason 
with error i9 smooth and creamy with that politic 
assurance that renders God a tool worker, in .sympathy 
and love with creed and her proselytes of unstable 
purposes, going the rounds of God's Bible items, and 
resting with a self-poised consciousness that they have 
mastered religion, shaken hands with God, and bal- 
anced all their indebtedness to heaven, making that 
abode of harmony scot-free, wherein they may enter at 
will and be happy, by simply believing, with or without 
the exercise of reason, that God has invested all the 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



power of salvation in and through the Church ; and by 
paying well to support the great conundrum, the 
chances are enlarged for a right hand seat, well 
cushioned, a harp at hand, and God listening — well 
pleased of course — to another prelude from the aris- 
tocratic peans of earth, and saying, no doubt, in a busi- 
ness like way, with the sexton : " I gather them in — I 
gather them in ! " 

Where in the name of the living God is there any 
spirituality in such an off-hand process of salvation ? 
it is like any other ring method for securing an equiva- 
lent that will fit some future scheme. I tell you, my 
earth friends, God cannot be bought, never was, never 
can be, and heaven being a conjunctive term used for 
God's location, is also impervious to ring scheming. 
No one enters through the golden gate but those that 
bring their credentials from off the altar of self-sacri- 
fice, self-immolation, and that abnegation of spirit that 
walks on thistles to find a star, that abnegation of spirit 
that has led up through all the past, that has given a 
life to secure a principle. 

Robespiere, of the French Revolution, fought in the 
kingdom of his fury to protect the blood of France 
from the stain of inoculation, and thereby lessen the 
fame of ancestral glory and renown, which bigoted 
France clings to to-day with that tenacity of spirit that 
holds sacred a truth and a trust. It is the spirit of 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 67 

self abnegation principle, before the sword, that has 
decided the fate of nations. The rise and fall of em- 
pires rested in the individual spirit to conquer wrong 
and oppression, or die. 

We may count a world saved when there is one right- 
eous individual, be it man or woman, to protect the 
issue of life out of death, or right out from wrong. As 
long as principle lives, man and woman lives by the 
same law of encasement that governs the acorn from 
which springs the tree. 

If man's life was only in the realm of ideality, there 
could be no principle at stake, because principles only 
cage facts, and the ideal support that the brain claims 
and receives are the floating shadows on the round- 
house of science. 

Principles stake out our lives, and if we run counter 
to their admonishing appeal we suffer in the extreme 
of spirit life. 

My mission now leads to the planet Jupiter in its 
perihelion with other planets, and nearing the earth by 
the process of internal law, to protect earth from going 
backwards in the scale of intellectual compass. The 
earth forces retrograde in every thousand years, in 
capacity to overreach a certain point in law where mind 
can master the problem called death, and become en- 
tirely en rapport with that sphere of spirit life that is 



68 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

helping on the work. Jupiter has a protective force in 
consanguinity with the minds of earth, and her platform 
of liberty crowns her with power to throw out an elon- 
gation movement that earth may grasp and become 
self-protecting in the scale of progress, and not go back 
to any darker age, to start again on a dead sea basis 
that always surrounds an unfledged world. 

Hypocrates, — whose ancient history baffled the minds 
of his time, — now reaches to me the hand of fellow- 
ship, saying : " Come with me, thou searcher after 
truth, let us walk hand in hand, heart in soul to the 
fairy land of Jupiter, that I have but dimly seen in her 
wealth and beauty of - conception. Come, Theodore 
Parker, to this mount of transfiguration, and bend thy 
soul in reverence and awe sublime before this grand 
equation of truth, that thou must make friends with, 
and comprehend by study the glory of her mission with 
earth." 

I have known for some time that I must advance 
from my mole-hill of ideas, to a broader atmosphere 
where I could study the planetary system and evolve a 
compass that would lead me to the exact figures I 
sought in the algebra of my mental philosophy. I 
have long known that God signifying good only existed 
in all natural law, in all the fundamental principles gov- 
erning the planetary system in all the orbit of space, 
God-lived in the soul right of spiritual law, governing 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 69 

all matter. I now know that a grain of sand is as much 
a kingdom to establish the soul of its being, as a moun- 
tain or a monarchy ; and as I live in that grain of sand 
or matter, I live in the infinite God, or whole of infinite 
principle, which is evolving substance from the friction 
forces of .crater strength, meaning heat intensified by- 
polar light. 

In visiting Jupiter I have two objects in view, first, 
to try and arrive as much as possible under the law, as 
I am of limitation to the necessity of life, and its con- 
sequent unfoldments as relative to the term God and 
the truth in the term science, because God and science 
journey in the same craft of obedience to polar secre- 
tiveness ; the one carries the credentials to sustain it- 
self, while the other hangs on the hinge of credulity, a 
wiseacre supported' by the theology of all nations. 
My second object in visiting a globe of the immensity 
of Jupiter, is to ascertain for a certainty her relative 
position to earth, and her keynote of principles, and 
their vibratory accord with the inherent action of earth. 
The motor impelling me is grander than I ever dreamed 
of while on earth, else I think my midnight toil would 
have made me a wiser student, and a more glorious 
man. 

I must know for a certainty if the law establishing 
materialization on earth is a governing law in Jupiter, 
and in any way controlling in the matter of earth. I 



70 THE LESSORS OF THE AGES. 

must know my accountability to principles ; if the law 
that gave me birth fits any unknown law in science, or 
if the same law that projected my life and individual- 
ity to earthly condition, is able by a lengthened process 
of primates to re-establish my earthly appearance. 

I do now know that the law governing birth is the 
forensic law governing all of matter, and all of spirit. 
I now know it to be a fact, which I have demonstrated 
to my great delight, that I can clothe myself in a rari- 
fied condition of matter, and appear on earth, under 
the positive and negative forces of the male and female 
aurification of blended harmony in purity and purpose, 
letting me choose the subjects, and bring the help of 
band influence to aid in mastering conditions. 

But the point I wish to establish is this. Is Jupiter 
in harmony with earth in this present work ? and is 
this law an abiding law with the inhabitants of that 
planet ? and do they work for the furthering of science 
and the eliminating of principle, or for pleasure, and 
her train of idlers ? 

Hypocrates says to me : " I believe that Jupiter car- 
ries the key to unlock this male and female element in 
all the universe, of extended matter, and bring out the 
finale of readjustment to first law or primary condi- 
tions. This then must be the secret of spiritual labor, 
to so formulate a plan that death cannot occur when 
the spirit understands its mission and how to protect 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 71 

by infiltration the germ of its being and accountability. 
Many minds of earth have tried to grasp this idea, but 
have failed in its spiritual sense to grasp the lever of 
its accountable purpose ; and now while the world is 
asking, " What shall we do to be saved ? " let us in 
spirit life touch the rudimentary of this life, in system 
and concern of achievement and final success over all 
difficulties. 

Webster has so compounded words and parts of 
speech, that there seems to be no abstract formulation 
of language on which to build a system of complete 
rhetorical study for the capabilities of coming genera- 
tions ; but we are not to suppose from the outspoken 
fact that the key to language has served its purpose, 
and been lost in the rubbish of the past, never more to 
unlock another sentence, silver tipped for the ideality 
of the future's demand and comprehension. 

Basic law is first law, and law always keeps pace with 
demand. To-day the world demands spiritual light, 
demands a hearing from the other side of material dis- 
solution ; since the rudimentary stages of life could not 
grasp the spiritual side of nature. A constant mingling 
of duodecimo parts have spiritualized and refined mat- 
ter from the cosmo of condition to its present utility of 
rarified action, that finds its spirit in spite of the whole 
creedal world, in spite of any system of logic not com- 
patible with the growth in the admixture of primitive 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



science. If we dwell in a house not made with hands, 
who is to find fault with the house only from the stand- 
point of not living to our best spiritual knowledge ? 
Science never errs, always true in quality and quantity, 
always true in the mandate of its mission, whether it be 
in the growing of a potato cr building a world. The 
essential elements are always wanting to produce cer- 
tain effects ; if the farmer likes not the effect from one 
year's cultivation of the soil, if he is wise he tries an- 
other method the next year, and so by experience he 
tests science, and finds that her crescent of peace always 
rests in the harmony of conceivement, always rests in 
the male and female aura for procreation. 

Science folds all things to its bosom of purification, 
and unites principles by the force of consanguinity in 
the soul-relationship of being, while God moves in the 
orbit of secular opinion, a sarcasm over all prolific 
nature. 

The dead sea of Micha's time and generation calm 
and purposeless, serving only in name and the fetish 
proclivities of all nations and generations of men. 

When the mind outgrows a personal God, there can 
be no personal Devil, the league will be broken, and 
science will split the difference between the two, and 
shoulder the responsibility of both; both are factors 
for church mogulship and play their parts to suit the 
mission of the ministry, which fears to lose either as 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 73 

the natural props to their ghostly religion, soon to droop 
. for want of that nourishing principle called faith, that 
has held so many centuries to the horns of this great 
dilemma, in hopes to obtain the knowledge which it 
sought, but never can reach through any cidevant at- 
tachment of creed. Faith has shouldered more spirit- 
uality than the church ever dreamed of ; her sweet be- 
nignity and smiling care has pushed doubt from its seat 
of error, and led out on a wide range of ideal beauty, 
whose conceivement process lies in the true adaptabil- 
ity of scientific principles, that always hold for better 
conditions when rightly blended in the fetus of design. 
Science has always been trying her luck at reconstruc- 
tion ; reincarnation means the fitment of principles to 
produce causes ; cause follows effect as naturally as 
sunshine follows a shower in May-time. 

The dark ages were followed by light, from off the 
altar of a broader demarkation in the spiritual fitment 
of things relative to life and order. 

I presume to say that no object stands in my way of 
progress, because circumstances must bend to a will 
determined to receive a lesson for good in everything 
that moves on the car of fate destined to cross its path- 
way in life. I am no more afraid of death, for I have 
mastered its first problem, and shall solve its second 
and third appeal for more wisdom, more self-suf- 
ficiency in ordering my way of growth, my school of 



74 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

learning, my square and compass guide, if it leads 
through brambles, the scratching vibrates for greater 
efforts to be true to the man within, although the out- 
side Parker stands shabby before the public, and his 
third term or out-reach in spiritual effort offer him no 
more friends from the stand point of orthodoxy, still 
the spirit climbs to equalize the forces for readjust- 
ment and self poise, to maintain my feudal principles 
by the sword of truth, held firmly by the hand of ma- 
terialization. 

I ask no crown but the one made secure in the 
principles of reconstruction, that I can wear for the 
soul's benefit and humanity's need. I cannot toil 
without recompense, and I find it day by day in the 
mediums of earth, that are struggling to give food to 
the million, while they scarcely obtain food for them- 
selves ; but well I know that for such there is a richer 
repast awaits them than earth could serve from all 
her dainty store-house of luxuries ; and well I know 
that the souls of these mediums are rich and ripe with 
anticipation of future revealments that will cover all 
fraud with a mantle of truth. 

I know that preaching is good, but sight is better, as 
far as the second birth is concerned ; and if I come, 
again, readjusted as of old, who shall say that spiritual- 
ism proper is a myth, and not reliable under test con- 
ditions ? My will to do is greater than my ability, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 75 

because conditions always move their front of opposing 
power before me, and I have to await time's movements 
for a better adaption of chemical adhesiveness, which 
buoys me up through the law of consanguinity or polar 
attrition. 

The mediums that I am now testing for my reappear- 
ance are not new to the world, but to each other they 
are comparative strangers ; but destiny is stronger than 
death, for death only speaks to die body, while destiny 
masters the spirit. I have said to these mediums : 
Prove yourselves willing to obey my wishes, prove to 
me that you have faith in me, and I will in no way for- 
sake or cast you off, and now my hold over these 
mediums is as strong as the rosy bowers of God that 
are held together by the bond of duty and love. And 
can I play false at the eleventh hour when one of the 
poles of my battery has served me a score of years, 
never wavering when called upon for a broadening of 
experience, though the way out led through many dis- 
comforts ; faith held the anchor firm and true, and if I 
now make a demand that calls for different conditions, 
I am sure of my two bowers of strength, prolific to 
sound my title clear from all fraud. 

When next I move for readjustment it will be in the 
city of Chicago, when the spring time opens for the 
removal of my mediums, which number three, poor in 
purse as a Cambellite preacher, but rich in the circum- 



76 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

ference of toil, and daring of spirit to live on cobwebs 
if need be, to secure the right of way, with the attach- 
ment of modern spiritualism, whose first note awoke 
the world from the dead sleep of atheism, to find life 
and death in the broad arena of nature's design, and 
science, the folding power that will prostrate and cripple 
every synagogue of error in the land. 

If my visit to Jupiter brings me nearer to earth, I 
shall hail all light that I can make use of for the 
world's benefit ; and should my mission prove fruitful 
I have a wide range on earth for my gleanings ; the old 
world as well as the new must feel my presence and 
acknowledge my return. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 77 



CHAPTER VII. 

WHAT lessons do we need, or what lessons 
can we receive but those of experience ? If 
we walk into the school room wherein is taught all the 
verbal languages, wherein is taught mathematical pre- 
cision on blackboards and on slates, wherein is taught 
philosophy, mental and scientific, wherein is taught self 
culture in its rudimentary stage, it is so much experi- 
ence for the world we are building, so many lessons for 
our world in space, that we are prone to take care of, 
because we cannot help it. 

Necessity speaks to the soul the demand of its na- 
ture ; and sooner or later every soul possessing the key 
to individuality moves for more light, more wisdom to 
guide it safely to headland quarters. All the lessons 
we learn prepare us for broader research, broader lati- 
tude for thought, broader demand on heaven, a broader 
insight in the kaleidoscope of science, and a fulminat- 
ing purpose to grasp science and secure God. 

Men and women live too much on the external issues 
of developing conditions, they do not reach for the 
silver lining that pervades every circumstance in life ; 
they do not see that events are the mile stones on the 



78 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 

road of progress, at which we stop, look back and take 
thought for the onward way. 

I know that my medium's soul is filled with beauty, 
as she writes at my dictation, filled with that sense of 
oneness with all pervading nature, and feels my pre- 
sence as teacher, friend and guide, to lead her higher 
than earth and fill her soul with a spiritual light, to 
become a better and more efficient worker while time 
may hold her physical strength. The experience to me 
is beautiful, because I feel the good I am doing. I 
feel that it is a lesson which could not have been 
spared from my book of life ; and so I treasure it as a 
gem in the rough, that time and experience will polish 
for infinite acceptance. 

Of all the past I would not rob one moment of its 
treasured influence. One tear drop may contain the 
heart throes of nations. One smile, when lighted at 
the heart-core of sympathy, may sunbeam a universe, 
of trouble and feel no loss at the centre flow of 
benevolence and sweet-eyed charity, that sees God 
behind every ambush of wailing sin, when disintegrated, 
finds its leader heavenward and above board, intent on 
probing the equation of motive and action that sink or 
save us all the days of our lives. No one's life boat 
can save me but my own. I must stand at the helm 
and do active service every day of my life. I must 
receive light and compass by looking within, and help- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 79 

ing without, by studying the laws of my own being, and 
if I can, find a correspondency in the man-made laws 
of the land, but if not, if antagonism is the result of 
scrutiny, and my life boat gets creaky under the pres- 
sure of tyrrany, I say, Avaunt ! ye spurious shackels, 
let me steam ahead, guided by my interior law of God 
welding and purity of purpose, to breast every storm of 
whatever character, with my armor of trust buckled 
firmly around me, and truth carrying the pointer to 
success. 

Want never troubles me, because I know I shall 
solve its mystery, and fatten on its purpose. I never 
wanted money but to prolong my knowledge, to make 
me at ease with my out-reaching soul, and at peace with 
conscience, that always told me to succor the needy, to 
give of my portion, for my own soul needed a growth 
that it could only receive through giving. Money never 
had any meaning for me but God ; so much money for 
so much wisdom, which I liken to God, and is the ulti- 
matum of all the value there is in money, or capital 
representing money. If I use money, speaking from a 
worldly point of view, to cater to all the unnecessary 
wants that the physical may rear before me, I am 
playing nigard with my soul, and creating a desert 
where should be an oasis of ever springing verdure 
and beauty of design. If I have a thousand dollars, 
and I divide it with a friend that needs just half to 



80 THE LESS OX S OF TEE AGES. 

satisfy his law of necessity, I am building my God, and 
helping another person in a like process. If I have 
but an apple, and give it to sustain a hungry brother or 
sister, as the case may be, I am doing just as much 
with my apple as with my thousand dollars. The 
motive is the flower in the soul that fills all the arcana 
of nature, and God picks it with great hope of its ex- 
panding merit. 

The only thing that Christ taught that holds vital 
import to the world was the crucifixion of selfishness. 
Subdue the lion in his den, that the keeper may walk 
free and untrammeled to the hearts of the people. Self- 
ishness robs us of heaven, and keeps us knocking at 
the door of hell continuously, with a burden that every 
pilgrim, thus loaded, finds too heavy for easy carrying 
and straight walking. Selfishness is the crown of 
thorns piercing our temple of thought with the startling 
inquiry : " Of 'what use is self, when burdened with its 
own offal, and weltering in the flimsy guise of trying to 
deceive itself ? " It is of all burdens the heaviest to 
carry. 

Our homes may be built in all the typical splendor of 
the architect's design, may be filled with all the com- 
forts and elegancies that modern ingenuity has grappled 
with and accomplished, and we may dwell therein free 
from material cares, but we cannot shut away the other 
side of life that God holds before the mental vision, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 81 

and folded within each appeal is Christ's sermon on 
the mount. Little homeless children carry it in their 
earnest faces for progression for care and love to make 
heroes for the battle of life. Men and women whom 
misfortune has shouldered with crosses heavy and true, 
carry these same sermons before the selfishness of the 
world, for the world to read and act from. 

These sermons come in the feuds and discords of the 
national escutchion for liberty ; come in finance and 
its influence on all trading capital that national in- 
terest places in the vortex of use ; in railroad scheming, 
in banking speculation, and shaving of noted capital. 

We see sermons pointing upwards for a better rendi- 
tion of justice, mercy and love. In home circles these 
love pointers reach for more confidence and trust, if 
the terms have a separate meaning, more fidelity to the 
truth that is the binding cord uniting all families, unit- 
ing men and women in a lasting union that time cannot 
dissever, for eternity catches the unction of its promise 
and fulfillment of design. 

Christ's sermons can never be forgotten, because 
sooner or later every heart-beat of humanity must 
adopt the corner stone of liberty, for self poise and 
accountability of action. When we are free we are 
strong ; when bound we are like the caged lion, in 
measured tread, whose eyes speak the daring of the 
soul. 



82 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

Oh ! Liberty, thou art the crowned eagle whose eyrie 
is builded in the hearts of the nation. Thou art the 
giantess whose strides all nations have felt, and won- 
dered at thy power of inoculation that sent the thril- 
ling force divine to hearts and homes, to nations in 
bewilderment, whose crazy wrongs, the fires of hell 
could not destroy. 

Thy era, oh liberty ! is forever on, forever is thy 
chair in state, forever are thy handcuffs loosened, and 
thou art monarch in the nineteenth century, curtailed 
never more, for the league that bound thee to ignorance 
is broken ; and thou, oh wandering bird, art free, free 
as the name of God, whose idyl force no world can 
comprehend. 

No world, oh liberty ! can build without thy cheering 
smile ; no home can rear a structured tower of love, 
and thou be absent from its temple point of honor. 
Go forth, thou free-born autocrat, never more bend brow 
or knee to fulminate an unholy purpose ; never more 
can Gehenna's flames burn out the solid masonry of the 
triune cause, if thou stand firm and true, a belching 
volcano in the hearts of the people. 

It has been stated, and is at the present time, by 
scholastic and learned men and women, that Jesus of 
Nazareth came to the world to save sinners. Why then 
has he failed in his mission, both in and out of the 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



church ? for we everywhere witness the traces of un- 
development ; everywhere see Christ's failure as the 
vicegerent of God to wipe out sin from the hearts of 
the people. Those in spirit life that passed from earth 
under the hallucination of the blood atonement, find 
themselves hard pressed to seek a new anxious seat, 
where they can better contemplate the internal motive 
force that makes sinners or saviors, and find their sal- 
vation in accord with principle and practice, that go 
hand in hand for good or evil. The Jews fought 
Christ because he was not a more thorough diplomatist, 
because his spirit felt not the ring of policy and na- 
tional frenzy to protect the Jewish autocracy in its 
liason with the fungus power of money, that always 
swamps a nation when the golden key of principle fits 
not the locker of common sense. There is not a Jew- 
ish synagogue in the land to-day that endorses in full 
the messiahship of Christ, because Christ is not the 
holy templar of Jewish policies, and cannot fit the de- 
mand of Jewish cunning, and subterfuge of deal with 
mankind ; and so the Jewry tribes are trying to save 
themselves in a coop of financial scheming, where the 
devil presides ad libitum. 

Christ's burdens are over every medium in the land, 
because the force power of Almighty God is calling for 
conditions that the world is not prepared to give ; but 
sooner or later there will be a vigilant committee ap- 



S4 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

pointed in spirit life to oust all selfishness from its seat 
of ownership, that the light of immortality may shine 
clear and true. If men and women knowing the truth 
do not work with us, they are against us, and sheltering 
under the cover of some policy the grandest harmony 
the world ever vibrated under. 

The truth is apparent why mediums are dying or 
passing out to spirit life ; the love soil of earth is too 
harsh, too unyielding in sympathy and the twin-sister 
friendship to make conditional strength for a sensative 
in the hands of spirit guides; and so many of the 
world's workers are being removed to more genial soil 
for recuperation and prolongation of use. 

Eppes Sargent says to me : " Why ! Parker, I feel 
like a boy in this atmosphere of love and individual 
protection. I feel new springs of attachment, new 
vibratory powers, new ambitions, new forces, new life ; 
a newer God on which to base my preconceived ideas 
of theology ; and now that I am clothed anew, I must 
work with new vigor, and new daring, to clear the world 
from bigotry and superstition." 

We in spirit life hail all new comers that have the 
spiritual light, opening the way to a better readjustment 
of solvent principles, that can help on the world's re- 
demption from sin, or the carnal field of ignorance, 
which produces all there is of our so-called devil. 
When I wrote, or caused to be written, " Food for the 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 85 

million," I was ignorant of many things that I have 
since familiarized myself with. I have been obliged to 
change the chemical aura in the brain-working of the 
medium employed, and have been obliged to almost 
separate the spirit from the body, in order to accomplish 
the work I have in view. And now, at this period of 
writing, the brain of the worker is punctured through 
and through with the spiritual afflatus that the angels 
can make use of, in disintegrating matter for the pur- 
pose of reconstruction on a more spiritual basis. 

The key to unlock dynamic science has been used to 
some extent in all the generations of men, but the les- 
sons of each age show to us how rudely science has 
been treated, when brought to bear on the divinity of 
God, and man as well. 

The rudimentary stages of life in formative concep- 
tion were the outworkings of gross conditions ; nebulous 
design furnishes no clue to rudimentary matter, for the 
reason that the key to matter is found in the solvents 
of light and heat. There is no mind that can grasp 
the strength of heat, no mind that can solve the power 
of light ; it is centrifugal in its omnipotence of working 
order, and must perforce work out a broadening of 
matter and intensifying of spirit. In grasping science, 
God is chained to the only vehicle that moves by the 
lever of internal force or action. We cannot see with 
the external orb of sight, science at work in her dainty 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 



kitchen, preparing with a skilful hand all the outward 
display of nature's grand variety, tossed into space 
and uplifting for strength to stay its equation. 

Nature is no mystery when we understand design 
and its full toned law of equity ; nature builds from 
centre effulgence, and all of typical science is an 
expression of centre inspiration, an expression of the 
harmonizing power of love that permeates all of chem- 
ical vibration. Chemical law is the love law ; there is 
no other law that can make use of the stamp act for 
procreation. Love fathoms everything in the unity of 
forces, and its highest expression is always obtained 
from its conditional activity. Love in its spiritual 
meaning is outside and beyond any human law to con- 
trol, and there is where the world must balance its jus- 
tice, and let love work in its chemical adaptability for 
the furtherance of a true science, and as the modus 
operandi for spiritual manifestation and life, giving 
hope to the world. Love is the true chemist in all 
nature, touching all the germinal points with a skill 
known only to love in the silence of her ecstatic mo- 
ments. Love dares to do, because love is the highest 
attribute in the equation of Godly science, and cannot 
be overcome by any show of nominal power ; and in 
its highest expression on spiritual basis, it is uplifting, 
outreaching, and forever in the sphere of duty, leading 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 87 

the way to the grandeur of conception and the possi- 
bilities of man. 

The second birth should be above suspicion ; should 
be as clearly defined and original in circumference as 
the first birth. The first broadens in matter and spirit ; 
the second birth deepens in spirit to fathom the possi- 
bilities in the concavity of science. We dig our own 
graves, lay aside our bodies, if indeed we can call any- 
thing our own that fully belongs to God in nature. 

" We are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body nature is, and God the soul." 

A truth that Pope immortalized when under the glow 
of a divine revelation, and as we are component parts 
of this stupendous whole, we do not wholly belong to 
ourselves, and thus from the law of necessity, which we 
cannot countermand. We dig our own graves, lay aside 
our bodies, and work in the springtime of regeneration 
for the elongation of a correct love principle, founded 
in justice and applied to all of human work. 

The terror of the cross is more than the cross itself, 
because we all lack the full development of trust, and 
go on wailing in the fear of what is to be, borrowing 
that which we do not need, and trampling in the dust 
that which we do need. 

Of all things transpiring in order, truth is the most 
able revelator, that stands guardian beside our daily 



88 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

lives ; but we, heedless of its strength to sustain and 
uplift us, grow weak in suppressing the claim of her 
mission. We are wanderers in the dark, from the fact 
that we do not seek the light from the border-land of 
ethical science, that fits in evenness to every part of our 
structured whole ; and so we roam in midnight caverns, 
because we have not the stamp mark of individuality 
that lays a claim for spiritual need. 

Spirit is the solar key that unlocks the universe of 
matter, and therein finds the subtlety that produces 
aurefaction. 

Goethe found life's history in stones. In climbing 
rocks he saw the grandeur of aspiration. In the bril- 
liant hues of earth's smaller gems he attested the power 
of inspiration ; the power of harmony in its distilling 
effects, to make counterpoise the light that never goes 
out, but ever makes strong the claims of its possessor. 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE lessons of the ages have been wrought into 
all of our lives, and we cannot fathom the cur- 
rent of their work ; however deft the hand of time it 
fails to cover up the deformities of ancient precept and 
example which were the result of crude materialism 
that hampered all outflow of spiritual light, and be- 
came the channel through which floated all the errors 
of life ; and to-day the materialistic element is flooding 
the world, and leading the way to a religious insurrec- 
tion that, if not beating the old world in its terror and 
crimes, will place a stigma over the newer empire that 
no freedom of thought can ever clear away. Oh I ye 
of little faith, when ye only see the body, and the 
world, when ye only see God in money, in the shifting 
of currency to make speculation the grand hiatus to 
fill the coffers of the rich, and to blast all the energies 
of the poor, making them slaves in this land of consti- 
tutional freedom. 

If we do not accept the things of this world on a 
spiritual basis, as God's table-land of trial to the hu- 
man heart, then we are living in an atmosphere where 
Satan rings the bell to duty. Every shade of deal in 



90 TEE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

the whole world should be carried outside of self, and 
into the charming atmosphere of filial duty, to prolong 
its success and make friendship with God. 

What is grander than self-abnegation, getting behind 
ourselves in God-effort to secure the principle that 
will benefit all who may come within its influence and 
scope of wisdom. There is no use in trying to live 
for ourselves ; it cannot be done with any satisfaction 
to mind or body. The mind becomes dwarfed, and 
the body a prey to the worm that never dies, surround- 
ing itself in an atmosphere where devils love to linger, 
and carry on a wdrk with the soul, that leaves its stag- 
nant impress in all the atmosphere surrounding it. 

The mind can never learn too much of Christ, for in 
learning love in all of its missional aspect, we have 
travelled away from self and entered into the lives of 
others, reincarnated ourselves in God for peace and 
protection. He who lives away from self lives the 
most to the self's advantage. Purification takes place 
when the soul says, " Let me help mybrother or sis- 
ter ; " let their temple of want be my soul's stronghold 
of growth, and let my friendship pass around their 
trouble, making their burdens less, and the cord of 
sympathy strengthened, which must yet pass round the 
world as the galvanized chain, uniting all hearts in the 
brotherhood and sisterhood of evangelical principle 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 91 

and purpose, the two forces that work together in 
Godly sway for humanity's good. 

The time will come on earth when all will have 
homes ; all will be protected and cared for ; all taken 
by the hand and made to feel that they are welcome, 
being so much of God given to the world to prolong 
all the attributes of mankind. 

I have noted all the footsteps of my medium, have 
seen her struggles to overcome want, to place herself 
in the conditions for unfoldment required by me. I 
have seen her in the homes of the rich, where arbitrary 
measures was the death-blow to any spiritual manifesta- 
tion, and where her sensitive spirit felt the chills of 
despair. The rich have an arrogance and self-satisfac- 
tion that leads hell-ward faster than the dram-shop, the 
billiard saloon, or any outward appeals that tempt the 
weaker side of human nature. I have traced my medi- 
um to the homes of the poor ; have witnessed the per- 
fect display of charity ; the unfoldment of a love that 
stood sponsor to God for many sweeps of error that 
the world term unpardonable sin and flounders loudly 
against, but secretly courts the shadow and embraces 
the substance. It is strange how the rich curse the 
poor for the same fealty to error that they cling to so 
tenaciously themselves. I sometimes think that in the 
world's opinion there would be no sin if there were no 
poor ; it is so easy to skim over the faults of those sue- 



92 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

cessful in money developments, and hang a bell and 
clarion around the neck of poverty at bay, with the 
same offence that should meet with the same penalty. 

Self-sufficiency, from a money basis, is a very poor 
article to attempt to reach heaven on ; its strength is no 
more than ihe vapor from the sunshine on the dew, and 
never bears a feather's weight in the great system-house 
of Godly principle. I should rather be swallowed by 
the whale that drank in Jonah — if it were possible to 
resurrect him with all of his swallowing capacity — 
than to load my soul with the principle to gain all that 
is possible by fair means or foul, as the case comes to 
hand, and never let go, whatever the necessity before 
me. 

Why ! Jonah was in heaven with his whale, compared 
to a soul in the stagnant pool of self-gain, reaching 
continually on all the baser passions of the brain, and 
only asking for a heaven as a place to make money in, 
and show up the Jew side of character. 

Man is the result of chemical combination, the radi- 
ating stream running through and penetrating all of 
nature's ambitious movements. Chemical combination 
holds God in firm faith to the universe, a beacon star, 
beckoning mind to the glory of rightful conceivement. 
God is the influx of solar consultation or attraction, 
which means the fitness of two or more harmonies to 
produce a decided result. God can never go down, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



because God is imbedded in principle ; even the name 
signifies everlasting, a grand hiatus unfolded in all the 
mental strata of science. 

What has the Bible to do with God, only as the offer- 
ing of so much mind when intellects were grovelling in 
materiality, and knew not of the power of the spirit, 
but nevertheless is the meandering voice that holds the 
Bible accountable for good. The science in the Bible 
is its spiritual fitment to the minds of to-day. We must 
admit that God has either grown, or the standard for 
intellectual capacity has moved for higher expressions 
and experiences of God's forensic merit, as a builder 
and protector of even this one universe that we are 
trying to embrace with knowledge and spiritual appre- 
ciation. 

God holds us by force of consanguinity, by the law 
of cause and effect, by solar attrition, by all the love 
power that blends in the science of action. The les- 
sons of the ages tell us that mind travels by the force 
of its need, by its inability to lay idly by on the moor 
of a harvested whole. The children of Ninevah, when 
time shouldered them with responsibility, found them- 
selves in advance of their parents, found that when 
mind doubled its equation it was, technically speaking, 
a broader builder, and a more cosmopolite anchor on 
which to rest responsibility. We only grow because 
God grows ; God says, " find centre law, and eliminate 



94 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

or unfold for the expression of your God," which I am 
bound to respect, being managed and controlled by 
the same law of science that I stand sponsor for. 

Science tells me I am but a chip from the olden 
block of. the free masonry principle running bi-sexually 
through all nature, and from nature up to nature's God, 
meaning the Schiller of spiritual attainment. What, to 
me was death, but gain ? Gain masterful and grand, a 
climax in my life that makes me wide awake to every 
duty that I may owe to every individual, to every cir- 
cumstance that held within its scope of influence one 
burnishing ray to beacon top my spiritual manhood. 

God placed me. in the world in accord with scientific 
adjustment to the principles of harmony that produce 
instellar light ; and to-day, or now, I possess the same 
basis of life that science gave to my babyhood, and 
entrusted to my spiritual being to protect and enlarge 
upon as the outflowing demand should effect my mental 
supply of Godly truth and Godly error, or good and 
evil, for both stratas of propulsive science are under 
the harmonizing influence of God's equatorial design. 
My voice of conscience is my speaking voice of God ; 
my solution of right and wrong, my mental algebra that 
I figure from to find the right heaven that claims the 
right God. 

Let men and women seek heaven through the right 
motives and methods and it is sure to be found, sure to 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 95 

crown every effort of mental out- reach that has the love 
of humanity in heart and soul. 

Every thought we put forth for good wears its crown 
in the atmsophere of godly light ; and every thought 
for evil trails alongside the red flag of treason to the 
doorway of devil devices and sin. The resurrection 
morn commenced when mind cut loose from the 
caprices of a personal God, and started out from the 
dead waters of rebuke to find the mystery of God in 
the principle of elongated science, winding its shaft of 
power wherever there is an enactment of cosmo law. 

The science of to-day rears its formidable structure 
against the bare-headed godism that faced the world in 
the bloody reign of the Csesars, in its almighty hoist of 
strength in moslums, towers and inquisitions of the 
fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. God, at 
that time in the world's wisdom, was force, murder, 
rapine, and all that made life's history hideous in 
detail, and the summing up of each epoch of godly 
goodness was confined in the church globule of sin and 
unmitigated tyranny. 

The world is owing to God at this day a sermon on 
recantation, a take off or apology for having shouldered 
him with the devil's luggage, when he was trying . so 
hard to out wit the adversary that through a false move 
came into partnership with him in his idea of build- 
ing a world. Superstition, which is the child of 



96 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 

ignorance and the hell fire of orthodoxy, has be- 
smeared our true and living God with an ornamenta- 
tion of diabolism deeper set in coloring and purpose 
than anything ever ascribed to Satan in the method of 
his labors. 

As I journey heavenward, or scienceward — the 
terms imply the same in effect — I am forced to re- 
spect the truth, finding it wherever I may, in its local 
bearing around earth and time, and in its Fielding like 
force around the altar of man's spiritual attainments. 
Truth is the iago wrapped in a mantle of disguise and 
treading the foot boards of time in the close attention 
to the ever fluctuating devices of man, but ever firm in 
its stately method of cause and effect. If I flit away 
my time I am a pauper before the infinite God within 
me, and the truth of my skeleton ship maintains its 
evidence against me, and I am forced to see myself a 
sail boat, when I might have been a ship, might have 
been the two Parkers and maintained the trio on earth, 
had I not flitted away time in the souless search after 
the immutability of all things in the creeds and diplo- 
macies of men, that run counter to truth, ever have, 
and ever will, so long as science is separate from God, 
or so long as God is only found in the heavens, 'and 
man is trying with the wrong key to unlock the sanctu- 
ary of this divine selfship. 

The term heaven is the acme of all growth, the main- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 97 

tainance of virtue over vice, good over evil, the perfect 
self poise gained from the possession of the right instel- 
lar motor ; to first search within, to find God or heaven, 
and if there is a counterpart in the heavens, be it in- 
dividuality or condition, you are sure to come into 
cotopaxion with the governing element in space, and 
find the solution to God's mysteries, which is found to 
be individuality, termed heaven and hell, good and evil, 
or God and Satan : Bible mythologies. 

The all pervading universe of matter and spirit I find 
in the individualization of the human character, which 
perforce reaches the summit of its aspirations. Man 
finds no God outside of his own temple of keepsakes, 
outside of his analytic powers of comprehension, that 
must resolve God to first principles in order to find 
the substratum or bono on which to rear a living 
entity. God is as plain as ABC, but it is the God 
within the manhood of man, or the fire and water 
principle permeating the fluidic strata of all conceiv- 
able purpose which lies in the womb of nature, and is 
male and female in its approximating influence of ges- 
tative design. 

Noah's Ark is but a representation of the world or 
nature in cosmo condition, allegorical, a picture within 
the frame of human reasoning and human condition. 
The Bible is a pool of philosophy, so large that it takes 
in everything and admits nothing. God is a bankrupt 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



from the first : guilty of spurious power, spurious method, 
and spurious attachment to heaven and earth, and is 
therefore allegorical and filled with the fumes of smoke 
that will last as long as man sees a crown above the 
principle in nature, or in the liberal sentiment in his 
own Godism. 

It is not theory to-day, but facts, that the mind is ask- 
ing for — facts to substantiate our creed in the natural 
law of order and disorder. Creed signifies the handle 
to a solution of what has been a mystery. 

My creed was once Unitarian, the baptism of all to 
final restitution or peace with God, providing there had 
been a quarrel. My creed is now humanitarianism, the 
whole world my brother and sister, and God within 
pointing to success as we remove the object of selfish- 
ness by clasping hands with the monarch we allow to 
be progress. 

The lessons of the ages say the mind has been 
dwarfed by holding to a creed ; it has thus happened 
because the creed was false ; there is no dwarfing in 
the knowledge of facts. My creed is a fact that no 
one can gainsay, for God's home is the human heart 
and templed shrine of wc manhood and manhood. 

The spirit world is the objective force, I may say, 
which the world of time is laboring under to-day, or 
now, because spirit permeates matter with a concussion 
that disintegrates conditional purposes and designs. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 99 

The design is now money, and the world wants to be 
let alone in the methods by which it is to be obtained. 
This rut of pollution and sin is deepening in its criminal 
principle to submerge the poor in the bankruptcy of 
rich men's souls, tying them hand and foot to this demi- 
god of church mogul-ship and church instituted power 
as old as God, being the base frontal of man's spiritual 
kingdom, done brown in the histories of his material- 
ism, and never so much awake as now in the internal 
voice that finds its correspondency in the thrilling mes- 
sages from spirit life, saying : " Oh, man, do justly, for 
the hour is at hand when the kingdom of heaven must 
be found within and graded with love to suit the wants 
of every human being. There shall be no mine, no 
thine, but all shall become a living temple of unselfish 
spiritism. 



100 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE lessons of the ages are folded away in the 
sepulchre of the past, and only needed as way 
marks of encouragement to the human soul. God is, 
and ever has been, the forensic law that binds all the 
epochs of time together ; for the circumstantial evi- 
dence that progress mounted the rostrum of effort, 
when God said : " Let there be light," meaning evolu- 
tion. It needs no teloscopic view to bring the past 
with its subjoined effort to master conditional circum- 
stances and step higher to the more elastic tune of 
progress that is ever in the breezes of God's theocratic 
design. 

History repeats herself ; and why ? Because God is 
before history, submerging science by the tail, that the 
head may become a revolving shuttle to feed all the 
looms in the centre cause and gravity, making the past 
ever in correspondency with the present vibrous motion. 
The past and the present, and I may also say the future, 
are in the keeping house of God's wisdom, and man 
must traverse and retraverse the mysterious clue to 
birth and accountability before the understanding is a 
ripened centre to act from in freedom and purity of 
design. The blessing of life is the only blessing that 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 101 

God could give, because it embraces all consequent 
action and motor of purpose. It is the liberal senti- 
ment permeating the glory of God's fullest conceive- 
ment, and is the affixed I Am that dwells on the throne 
of the most high, and the travelling agency that fills all 
the equator of motion, fills God and man with the same 
right to use those elements when nature makes a 
demand on the function of use. 

Life is the system of motion self existant in the 
gravity of law belongs no more to God than to man, or 
to the star fixed in the galaxy of the heavens, or to the 
tiny pebble in the singing brook, or to forest bird, or 
mountain ; all the wide range of natures individual 
plumings are first in life, and then in the effort of 
progressive evolvement. 

Why does man seek life out from the decay of the 
physical body ? Why, because life is the master beck- 
oning on to duty and work, beckoning on to the broad 
hemisphere of individual culture, which is the 
rarification of the God principle, love. Our world 
builders have been men and women, ever have 
been and ever will be, because there is no other 
method of propulsive being only what the male and 
female aura contain for the system-house of evacuation. 
Man possesses the key to unlock all the mysteries in 
or of science, and must insert that key to the right 
lock when God says let us move higher, for the tern- 



102 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

pies of spiritual growth are wanting more students, and 
your place is needed in the world of financial dis- 
counts, where dollars and cents try souls for the king- 
dom of heaven, and fit each soul with the implement to 
build for the spirit of mammon, or for the spirit of 
progress, that is wound into every cord of sympathy, 
vibrating in the hearts of all the nations, slow perhaps 
to perceive, because man is slow to reason from cause 
to effect, and builds more to the external revenue of 
solid worth. 

Spiritualists, as a class of free-thinkers, are more 
given, I think, to speaking of building their spiritual 
home than church going people, or those between the 
two. Those elected to church fellowship take it for 
granted that their spiritual home is secure and perfect, 
when the ram's horn of ecclesiastical power has sub- 
merged the sinner into the beatific attitude of saint, 
and their home in spirit life is builded under the ham- 
mer of God's selfishness, to bring a few to repentance 
to sing psalms for the honor of their salvation. How 
absurd the idea of a partisan God ; it fills the soul with 
a debasement more fearful and intolerant than the sup- 
posed wrath of their Supreme Divinity. 

The non-committal conditions of life betray very 
little selfishness, willing to leave the matter of life 
and death wholly in the bosom of fate, and if 
there is a God of infinite wisdom, having the affairs of 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 103 

all in hand, suppose him to be capable of distinguish- 
ing the saint from the sinner, whether the church holds 
him or not, and in the generality of cases do not suppose 
that by searching they can find any clue to a spiritual 
home that is so much talked about and so little under- 
stood. But the Spiritualists, or those calling them- 
selves such, talk in vivid manner of their prominent 
homes in spirit life, builded they scarce know how ; it 
may be on the church plan, because they believe so-and- 
so, and are in the crib of spiritualism, bound for glory, 
because mediums say : " This peach of infinite life and 
beauty is for you," notwithstanding they are possessed of 
the knowledge that good candy cannot be made from 
rock salt, and that homes in heavenly atmosphere are 
the result of a well poised central balance, that all the 
fires of earth's discipline cannot sway from its poise of 
honor and integrity of movement. Spiritualists have a 
broad acreage of truth that they are mounting with the 
skepticism of by gone and present time, because they 
do not see better results in the condition of humanity 
than the churches are bringing forth with the top light 
of liberalism that will eventually demolish creed, when 
mind swings the pendulum to the soul's accountability 
to the God within. 

Spiritualism proper mends all the breaks in human 
life, and places man in the round of circumstantial evi- 
dence that bears its own weight for or against a perfect 



104 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

union under perfect conditions. The union of friends 
in spirit life is under the law of condition the same as 
in earth life ; in spirit life the law of interest runs 
parallel with that same law on earth, although it may 
diverge in cause and circumference, and duty speaks 
her mission as correctly in one sphere as the other, and 
souls mingle and seperate much after the plan of 
earthly discipline, and carry forward the harvest of 
intellectual gleanings for the prosperity of a broaden- 
ing work. Spirit life is the life of the soul, the inner 
raying of thought for motionary work in the spheres 
that are material, and in the spheres that are graded 
more with spiritual deflections and are moving higher 
in the concordance of space. 

Soul life is the life that takes precedence in the morn 
of the resurrection, when man sees through the glass 
darkly, out to the broadening grandeur of a newer life 
that takes cognizance of angel forces and their modus 
operandi in the different departments of their missioned 
labors, that run parallel with earthly demand. Labor, 
in the sphere removed from earth, or in the local de- 
partments of spirit life, is as conducive to growth of 
the spirit as labor in earthly localities is condusive to 
physical expansion and mental accountability. 

All growth is the result of friction power. I must 
necessarily use my mental faculties else I rob God of 
so much time, which reflects to my own disadvantage, 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 105 

and makes me a pauper in the sight of riches which 
are always accumulating through the forces of mental 
need. 

I now need to come back to earth, having drawn on 
the exchequer of science. I am fortified with the 
weapon of truth, undeniable and unmistakable, that 
my mental labors have never ceased, that my whole 
orbit of action is as much a fact now as when earth 
held me to my physical body, which body disintegrates 
to suit my present need. I shall never loose my body, 
friends of earth, distinctly understand me. My body 
is at my own disposal, having learned its make, and my 
own necessity for its readjustment after a period of 
twenty-two years or thereabouts of sojourning in spirit 
life. I shall claim its resurrection and fitness to serve 
me in whatever time and place I can best make condi- 
tions which I intend to do in the coming months of '82 or 
'83. Do not doubt me, for God is with me in my work, 
holding science to the letter of transfiguration the same 
now as when Christ assumed the mythic suit for time 
and purpose. Christ's purpose was evangelization ; 
showing the power of the spirit to take on its earthly 
raiment, evidence conclusive that there is no death to 
primates; that man fosters his own birth in nature's 
storehouse of sexual cooperation and all transmigratory 
movement is as surely under the law of scientific ability 
and adaption as the law governing birth, which is the I 



106 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 

Am to all there is of the Gocl-power of encompassment, 
which power turns on its own axis of individual ac- 
countability. 

The evangelical principle is firmly fixed in nature ; 
and had there never been a gospel utterance in the 
literature of any nation, science holds the revibrating 
spirit for better conditions to establish better results, 
first in the spirit and then in the raying for external 
conception, is in accordance with the spirit ability to 
fashion and form on material basis to work out its own 
progressive march. Spirit is the acme surrounding all 
the spheres, and God being the spheroid around which 
all life and motion revolves, it appeals to reason that 
there can be no break in the spirit altitude of any 
scientific conception, because God holds nature in the 
rotundity of non-escapement, necessity being the lever 
law, unfolding mind to the full of its capabilities. 
Mind grapples circumstances with a force unrecognized 
by itself, because motion is quicker than sight either in 
the mental outreach or in the eye's power of compre- 
hension. The mind inflates before sight perceives. 
This world in its nebulous design was first a motion in 
science, then the rays of intellectual sight grappled for 
its rotundity in space, and the earth became a living 
poem inexhaustable and ever fresh in lyric substances, 
ever onward and upward as a sphere, working with all 
other spheres for the deepening of thought, the perfect- 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 107 

ing of principles and a maintainance of a Godly self- 
hood that will unite with the divinity in all things for 
mastery and accountability, with no Christ as a Saviour 
in mythic form and verse, but as far as his principles 
carry us. 

The rivulet opening to the great tributaries of moral, 
intellectual, political and financial success, " Nearer 
my God to thee," ever thrilled my whole being with 
that radiating impulse to lift every cover that concealed 
a truth or hid a God in embryo ; that a seed, a pebble, 
the roaring cataract and midnight star contain as much 
of God as I do, as much of centralization. The power 
of capability inherent in the chemistry of design, and 
acted upon by the circumstantial law of cause and 
effect, the light and shade of nature's evolving principle. 

Cassius dreamed of God as a sunbeam floating in 
space with always a reflecting ray of brilliancy for the 
just, who found favor under the law of foreordination, 
or the cast of an electoral vote, sueing for that redemp- 
tion from sin which is close upon the sin itself, and 
which no external God can remove without clasping 
hands with the God brother within, saying : " Let us 
work out of this moral mire which stamps both soul 
and body with the pauper's claim to infidelity." 

This rock of ages upon which individuals of all 
nations, countries and climes have split, and held 
fuedal opinions, is the rock of the God individual hold- 



108 THE LESS ON S OF THE AGES. 

ing the issues of life and death at the juncture of wilful 
caprice, and man the target to shoot down or up, as 
will dictated the preference. I think my God within 
me greater than any I have found without. 

If I accept the free songster bird of love in science 
which fills the whole bosom of our Father God, in 
heaven and on earth, I thank my God within my 
science of accountability, for the comprehensive power 
to join heart and hand with this wonderful God love 
ever around and about me, filling me with an un- 
bounded desire to use this redemption key to reach the 
highest altitude of my mind's capacity, for thereby I am 
gaining more of God, gaing an insight into the labra- 
tories of reincarnation, that men and women of earth 
so little comprehend at the present time. Scientific 
reincarnation is the great beam on which rests the 
opaque system equation ; the principle of evil bears the 
same weight for resurrection that is accorded to the 
principle good, else space fails in its power of distilla- 
tion to make an equipoise under the law of give and 
take. God's law is salvation ; which can only be sus- 
tained and perfected through the process of the re- 
incarnation of primates, unseen the by mortal eye, be- 
ing the work of the spiritual mendacity to accomplish 
raiment for the solidity of earthly pressure and need, 
and thus we all come under the subtle law of reincar- 
nation every day of our lives, be it under earthly 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 109 

atmospheres or under a more rarified condition of 
spiritual ramification, the law of equivalents works the 
same, and the law of justice reduced to practice, which 
is compensation, runs a parallel line of coagitation, 
working good from evil, and vice versa, as the case 
demands by the force of elongation. 

Mud is as necessary as sunshine ; both are the reflec- 
tions of conditional circumstances, inherent in the 
Godly aura of reincarnative science, which doubles its 
force under the grappling iron of mental accountability, 
freeing men and women from sin, being death, symbol- 
ically speaking. Luther admitted no death when he 
proclaimed heaven and hell to be eternal, and in 
cotopaxion with the juncture of God's will, because 
the lake of fire must be ever burning to be ready for 
sinner's, while heaven's platform must be stable ground 
on which the good find rest and hope. 

I well remember while on earth of being called to 
lecture in Burlington, Vt., a place then ready for the 
sweet crumbs of truth, but popular religion gives the 
bright winged songster a douche, before a full song can 
be heard outside of a popular church ; but I am well 
aware that many liberals in that vicinity believe that I 
spoke truth when I said, " There can be no evil only 
what God must claim, arrd claim by the law of rightful 
ownership, since all there is is God's to destroy in its 
infancy or to co-operate with, and swing before the 



110 THE LESS OS S OF THE AGES. 

mind of man that its deformity may show the work to 
be done, and to show that the power of God exists in 
the two contending forces, the positive and negative 
subtleties that work from density to the confluence in 
almighty space." Man must see God fully in order to 
grapple with or control this one half, or third of evil 
that as surely belongs to him, as that God belongs to 
the ripened grandeur of all things, either on earth, or 
in the outreaching glories of the summer lands. We 
cannot cage a beauty of any kind, but what has had a 
background of deformity of condition, relatively speak- 
ing, and termed evil by minds that cannot see God 
only in sunshine and roses, or in sylvan streams and 
ocean's garnered waters, that surely speak conditional 
umpire with a conditional God. Who flouts at sin, wastes 
his powder, unless it stirs within the soul the ambition 
and method to hunt it to the death, by the reconstruc- 
tive agencies of civil governments, that can only flour- 
ish as justice dips deeper for supremacy and the right 
to cast off and utterly destroy the money God of feudal 
sway ; whose hand is ever ready to grapple at the 
throat of demarcation. 

Who but God can destroy God ? I say let God alone, 
whose mythic grandeur fills all the spaces with an uned- 
ucated love, to make rich every soul desiring reforma- 
tion, but let us rather test this burning bush of evil 
proclivity, and see if Moses can come forth unscathed 



THE LESSONS OF TEE AGES. Ill 

and free to roam at will, when mind becomes a reflector 
that embraces sin if it does not seek to destroy it, and 
thereby fulminate a purpose of Deific import to all 
concerned in the grand march of the world's revolu- 
tion. 

If I cast off an old coat, I shall ask no one to adopt 
and wear it without its undergoing the process of 
renovation, to free it from the stain or ambition of a 
Parker ; neither do I wish any one to treasure my old 
sermons, without giving them the broad sweep of mind 
renovation ; for they could in no way serve me now, 
having lost balance in that groove of accountability, 
and I want my earth friends to come higher with me, 
walking the streets of the New Jerusalem, with the God- 
fire of solution pointing to better evils from better 
causes ; and I am as firm to-day on liberal and recon- 
structive principle as when those utterances lighted 
the feeble torch I held before the world, but which the 
world often refers to as the wheat and tares from off a 
mind not wholly free, but a carper still bound by the 
noose of public opinion, and the bull-dog of church 
aristocracy, labeled religion. 

The Sermon on the Mount speaks of beatific condi- 
tion, speaks as every sermon must that benefits a soul 
of that great latitude of love that covers a multitude of 
sins, until the reaper of education can cut down the 
shadow that obscures the sun. Wherefore do I speak 



112 THE LESSONS OF TEE AGES. 

to-day of the lessons of the ages, as each lesson bears 
its record in the spaces of eternal light, and the record 
is also kept in the earth's volition of movement, kept 
by the finger-marks of liberalism, that cannot tolerate 
a dogma unless it carries a truth in science, and sticks 
to that truth in church and out of church ; cannot tol- 
erate infidelity that runs counter to the God moloch 
within, and hangs tooth and eye to that power that set- 
tled over Babylon, laying her in the arms of priests to 
suffocate and strangle with hell-fire and brimstone ; 
and also dragged Rome by the iron hand of Godly 
despotism to the petrified condition of non-assumptive 
rights, quelching where it could not destroy free speech 
and free assumption to individual rights. Each lesson 
of each age has had this same infidelity to the princi- 
ple of right to contend with ; the God within has been 
nothing compared with that figure of expression with- 
out, riding in sunbeams and glory over the headland 
quarters of the rich, and casting the fungus of doubt 
over the hearts and homes of the poor. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 113 



CHAPTER X. 

LIBERALISM is the mind's liberator, and has 
cropped out wherever and whenever the hu- 
man brain has felt the inspiring motor of God's own 
truth, which is the spire of individual responsibility 
within, fixed within the human soul, soluble to reason, 
when infidelity stands by the side of sense instead of 
creed, and that olden holy book now undergoing recon- 
struction at the hands of this same priestly power, who 
are afraid to let go entirely of this shark that has been 
the open mouth through which sinners have passed into 
their church, dead to sin and individual accountability. 
I do not suppose God ever thought of revising his 
Bible, the good book of Greek indiscretion of compiled 
order ; but the enthusiasm of modern ecclesiastics has 
ignored its fitment, it seems, to serve the present need, 
and Bibles on the plan of Grecian approval are at a 
discount; and so this shark of ancient power must 
part with half of its head, tail and fins, to allow that 
the spirit of progress has entered the churches and is 
meddling with God in spite of himself. 

Ho ! for a deluge of God's immortal truth that will 
swallow up the sin and subterfuge of priestcraft that 
shines over the most important issues of life, and its 



114 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

consequent growth and bearing on Deity, the elongated 
principle in the method mills of science, and pins its 
favor on canon and creed, as something of easy access 
to obtain to, and covers what it cannot destroy, adding 
glory to monopoly and shame to Christendom. 

Ho ! for an archangel to place over Bible ground the 
placard, Peace to thy ashes, for liberalism must burn 
thee at the stake of common sense, and let nations find 
in thy ashes reconstruction ; for the hour is at hand, 
and the day not far distant when spirit voices shall ring 
in the new era, and put a new vamp to the soul of ille- 
gal power, which the Bible as surely contains as it does 
the Christ whose principles we all admire, and is the 
white dove of purity that will arise from the funeral 
pyre of Hindoo and Greek mythology, that have held 
plasters for creed and caste until the mind revolts at 
this Satan that assumes to be God in the face and eyes 
of honest people, that dare not pin-mark a Bible, for 
fear the cry of infidelity will mar the prospect of bread 
and butter, which is as necessary to physical life as 
truth is to the inner raying of thought and methods of 
growth. 

When childhood plays with beads and strings them 
for pleasure and system, shall we find fault because 
God did not produce a tree before an acorn ? a stagna- 
tion before a ripple ? which would upset his work com- 
pletely, as a drop indicates a shower, a seed a harvest, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 115 

system, progress, and God, evolution. Crater power 
from crater cause, embedded in the foetus of gestative 
nature, and cannot cease to act, or turn from its orbit 
of personality that determines its sex and accounta- 
bility. 

The crater of knowledge is the fundamental princi- 
ple in which rests the brain power of man, and no con- 
ceivement in science can escape the blasting force of 
mind ability to bring to its comprehension the methods 
and by-laws of scientific workmanship, which as surely 
underlie the brain throne of man as the brain throne 
of nature, both entities, being the natural results from 
natural law, and cannot be gummed over by the stucco 
of heathen history, that would make God a builder, 
without a known credential, hap-hazard like, prone to 
error and fits of reproach because his works were not 
better, from what he had to do with. The infinity of 
its bulk the world is now beginning to deal with, and 
to place where it belongs in the principle strata under- 
lying the outstamping of all material things. 

As the sunshine throws its golden rays around my 
medium, I hear the echoes from within her stirred soul 
for the broadening of a truthful monopoly, that will 
hang on the hinges of the world's intellectual, moral 
and free democratic government, that the swaying hand 
of our God in principle may sharpen the instrument of 
individuality to cut from the mind, creed, dogma, super- 



116 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

stition and the underbrush of popular opinion, which 
dwarfs and cramps the soul, making a cripple where 
might be a provost of power, and man might become a 
government unto himself, with nothing illegal to crush 
the growth of any other individual. 

The storm-king is at work as of old, to root out the 
spirit of monopoly, to make money an agent instead of 
a pcwer ; to make rebellions unnecessary, and peace, 
the organ of divine approval, sounding through all the 
avenues of reconstructive agencies, formulating around 
the system of governmental duties. 

Mourn not for a Garfield ; but measure the standard 
of his worth, and seek to imitate his virtues, and crown 
his loving kindness by showing mercy and care to an 
imbecile half crazed with the weight of his responsibil- 
ities, in a government all afoam with the spirit of trea- 
son, and Garfield's removal filled the measure of a side 
issue approval. Ye who seek the life of a Guiteau, 
and by taking it, can in no way replace in your midst 
the grand physique of James A. Garfield, his loving 
words, kindly deeds, and high sense of honor, would 
scorn to become a murderer, scorn to take revenge 
because he was no longer in the capacity of president 
needed in the world. The instrument that caused his 
death, the world needs to purify and cleanse from the 
leper of its own dishonest purposes. James A. Gar- 
field, in the magnanimity of his spiritual life, would 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 117 

have his successor pardon the criminal that is now be- 
fore the world of infinity, — would have the world of 
earth see that he has proper treatment and care ; that 
his labor and education be not neglected ; that, in his 
solemn duties he may become en rapport with the angel 
messengers, and learn that forgiveness is the spirit of 
Godly attainment in man, and worthy of his careful 
inspection, in the lone hours of meditation and com- 
munion with self. He says : 

"My soul goes out to Guiteau as a friend and 
brother. Forgive him, I do, for the rash act that gave 
to me the knowledge of the world's love for me ; gave 
to me also the knowledge of how far I could have 
satisfied the world as a leader, with my limited view of 
justice and knowledge of the right God in the right 
constitution. Forgive Guiteau, I do with my whole 
soul, and I want him to know and feel it ; want him to 
know that I am his guardian spirit forever on, or until 
we shall meet and he shall wish to appoint another, 
which I now know he will not. I only thank him for 
my release from the bonds that kept me in ignorance, 
and laid away the pillars of caste, creed, church and 
state monoply. Crowns and scepters become as naught, 
and I stood at death's release with a knowledge of a 
universal self-government that will lash its waters of 
contempt and discord, until my broadening sight takes 
in the new Jerusalem of earthly building. Would I 



118 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

fail in acknowledgment of the world's expressed love 
for me by withholding the broadest side of my nature, 
making of myself a pigmy at the entrance of my new 
life, where everything glows with the radiance of divine 
love and pardon. Oh ! no, friends and family of earth, 
dear as my own soul, because a part of my soul, hear 
me say, Pardon Guiteau. I claim it as my right that 
the nation burn its animosity at the stake of Garfield's 
approval, and let Guiteau live on earth to condemn the 
spirit that prompted the act. What more can I say 
than I have here said ? Pardon the criminal that has 
already passed under the rod of public condemnation, 
and still hangs to the hope of a new trial that will 
liberate him from the noose of barbaric authority ; 
what more can I say ? Only this : oh ! friends of 
earth, leave Guiteau with his God on earth, under the 
bright canopy of the star-flecked heavens, to learn the 
lessons which come before us all, that deeds are the 
expressions that judge us for the cultured seat of Godly 
approval, or place us in the moral desert of worldly 
litigation, that lasts until conscience crowns herself 
with a God of principle, that no earthly chalice, how- 
ever bitter, can sway from its centre of right. This 
much I say, and leave Parker with his work, thanking 
him for this privilege to reach the public mind, and I 
also hope the heart, touched by the force of the world's 
intellect, will hear the ringing wave call : 'Judgment 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 119 

is mine saith the Lord,' and I will repay good for evil, 
not that I have changed in purpose, but the world is 
changing by the force of education, and the new dis- 
pensation is at hand when the sword will be turned to 
pruning hooks, and gall offered to no one. Farewell 
for the time, but further duties surely await me on 
earth, and thus I rest in hope that the world will heed 
my wish herein expressed, and cover the criminal with 
a mantle of charity so long and full that it will sweep 
from earth the demon of capital punishment, and let 
the hearts and intellects of humanity find better 
methods for averting the evils that beset the govern- 
ment, that the stringency of the hangman's rope may 
not be necessary, and may not be tolerated in a world 
stamped with the ten commandments, and carrying 
those stamps through every pulpit in the land, there- 
from basing a religion, a charity, a hope and a love 
that sadly belie in the action of spirit what the words 
convey to the heart and mind. I would that I could 
go farther with thought and expression with my friends 
of time, but must not now infringe on the kindness of 
another in giving me this opportunity through a sensi- 
tive and delicate instrument, already taxed to the full 
of mental and physical strength. Therefore I abide 
my time. James A. Garfield." 



120 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

Sweeter than ten thousand song birds 

Is forgiveness to the soul, 
Sweeter than the breath of violets, 

Sweeter than loves full control, 
Sweeter than its mystic breathings 

To the sapphire in the soul. 

Oh ! forgiveness, jeweled seraph, 

Who but Garfield proved thy worth ? 

"Who has shown it in its fullness 
But the hero gone from earth ; 

Not found wanting, be it written 
On the walls of heaven and earth. 

He for whom the world is mourning. 

He who done his duty well, 
Cannot rest beside the mountain 

While the valley breaths a knell, 
While Guiteau is bent and bleeding 

Let the cross serve him as well, 
For the guilty and the guiltless 

Must join hands for one and all. 

And so I believe, I believe the mighty forge of 
spiritual truth will at length swallow up and destroy 
the spirit of revenge, and man will stand forth in his 
true nobility of character, and work for the betterment 
of every human being, let the circumstances be what 
they may that impels a person to crime. The work of 
reformation must be done on earth, where all motives 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 121 

find lodgment for doing any deed of dishonor, and let 
the rewards and punishments take place on earth, 
formulated under a better system of spiritual athnetics, 
that surely surround the developement of mind in 
matter, or the skillful workmanship of man and woman, 
the truine cause wherein is based the principle of life 
everlasting. 

We cannot tread the wine press alone. It needs 
everybody's tread to make good vintage ground for the 
incoming tide of every generation, and woe be unto 
our spiritual condition if we skim lightly over the 
rugged path of earthly discipline, heeding not the calls 
from the monitor within to stand loyal to those princi- 
ples of honor, integrity and justice that have crowned 
the world with its present growth of spiritual enlight- 
ment. Every generation does not produce a Garfield ; 
but every generation does produce, or bring to the 
front of worldly knowledge, an inflow of spiritual truth, 
an influx of the Godism of love, a deeper insight into 
the methods of justice, a larger growth of kindly feel- 
ing one to another, better modes of treatment in cases 
of violated law, better systems of education, whereby 
the mind must see that divine principle that surges to 
the front of progress, and rings its acclaim of " Eureka" 
— I have found thee, must hold and keep thee, until 
earth must see the injustice of sending criminals to 



122 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

the bar of the infinite for punishment and purification 
for deeds done in the body, under the jurisdiction of a 
government wholly under the control of a money 
autocracy, swaying and verging to the side of popular 
influence. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 123 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE lessons of each age plainly reveal the fact 
that God and science are blending for broaden- 
ing of a grander principle of life, that cannot be 
smitten or destroyed by the breath of God's anger, or 
the creedal waves of hellfire that sprouted its purpose 
to save God and the church in legal power and union 
of feeling, to destroy those who dared to think, and 
would not bite at the church bait, but felt willing to 
try the chances of saving themselves, or to drift into 
the pool of atheism that always contains a grander 
God than any church ever welcomed to its sanctuary of 
worship. 

Let us illustrate, if you please, the infidels' God and 
the God of the churches. The infidel takes nature, 
unfolded in all her loveliness ; sees and admits the 
beauty and mechanism of her wondrous order and un- 
foldment of principle, how everything conduces to 
man's comfort, physically, mentally, philosophically 
and spiritually, for it is all in the bondage of love, 
swayed by the power of love, and is love itself giving 
from the God store of its fulness. And the man or 
woman that sees no farther, not yet being toplighted, 
says this is good enough for me, all I can digest now, 



124 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

but if there is something of more infinite value in the 
system of God or chance work, why ! I must find it. 
No church can ever secure that knowledge to me ; no 
church can find a God large enough to compare even 
in love with the God love expressed in nature ; and I 
must let reason work, the church enlarge, and God, if 
there is such an entity, work in the system of his own 
progressive laws, while I abide the march of time to 
find more light if I can. This to me is infidelity to the 
avowed Christian religion, that ties God hand and foot 
to the church wing of progress, a mere skull, going the 
rounds of all mythology, placed in the Bible as the 
headlight of power, swayed by the treason spirit of 
earth, and the formulated works of a monarchy ; princi- 
ple ever ready to take precedence when the devil opens 
the way through the door of self-sanctified religion. 
To me infidelity, to such pronounced selfishness, is a 
rose in the bud of mind promise compared to the 
Christian God walking the earth in money shoes, and 
held at money value. But for the bright wing of 
spiritualism, infidelity would be the cart before the 
horse, loaded so full of doubt that the church horse of 
ecclesiasticism would surely balk in attempting to move 
it on the up hill side to glory. 

Some will say : that is one of Parker's inelegant ex- 
pressions ; and so it is, but it nevertheless conveys a 
truth that time is ready to accept, and thank God for 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 125 

its truth ; and thus one generation or era of time builds 
a staging of a more spiritual tendency for the next 
advancing minds, that are always crowned with a little 
more light from off the altar of past experience. 

Why should we murmur at our lack of knowledge, 
which as surely comes when needed, and when the 
mind is prepared for it, as the rain comes to the 
parched and thirsty earth. Each branch of want is 
under the divine sway of movement, and cannot be 
hurried on the part of man. What the mind is pre- 
pared to gain it will never lose sight of. Time and 
eternity holds the development key to its fullest attain- 
ments ; £nd what one generation only sees in the dis- 
tance, the next may welcome by the hand and grasp 
with the mind, having the lessons of the past to learn 
from and improve upon, while the increasing power 
from the angel world, to be understood as still helpers 
in the vineyard of the Lord, is the propelling motor 
attached to the wheels of progress, that move under 
the spirit of natural concordance in nature ; the hollow 
globe ever full, and being made ready to fill again, that 
God may keep his own in the rotundity of scientific 
will, meaning the ability to form and fashion from the 
principle of elongation. The instellar key used by the 
God in nature to unlock a door when necessary and 
compatible with the mind range in worlds. 

To-day children are advancing in the gifts that puz- 



126 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

zle wiser heads, puzzle even ministers to know how 
they are going to fix their theology to suit these minds 
that seem so large in their small clothes ; where with 
the growth of the past few years even, and the still in- 
creasing light of spiritualism, find them in the years 
that follow on childhood, with the improved facilities 
for education, not surely in the cramped condition of 
creeds, where the mind is as sure to dwarf under its 
cover as a child under the shadows of evil temper, both 
contingencies of error, are halters around the neck of 
freedom, and ministers must enlarge their creed, or 
bottle up their religion, and keep it as a trophy of the 
past ungodly proclivities of man. 

The lessons of the ages bring us face to face with 
the naked condition of Adam and Eve, who were in 
the midst of knowledge and found it not, until they 
sought freedom, sought to do with the garden what 
seemed best to their mind, and the tree of knowledge 
being fair to look upon, supposed of course it must be 
pleasant to the taste ; and God, seeming to them an 
autocrat of unholy power, they thought to outwit him 
and get their just rights, which was the power to distin- 
guish good from evil, knowledge from ignorance, facts 
from prejudices, and truth from the combined muddle 
of orthodoxy and revealed religion, which every soul 
carries in quality and quantity ; and Adam and Eve are 
illustrations to every generation that knowledge is 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 127 

power, and no flaming sword of heathen superstition or 
modern invention can make powerless the mind to ob- 
tain it. When we are free we can study and profit 
from our studies ; but if bound reason beats against 
the barrier, and a collision occurs, and if will is weak 
the struggle to get beyond is an effort requiring too 
much courage, and so minds are apt to cling to what 
other minds have labeled truth, and to settle down to 
the dogma that God chooses some to look out for the 
salvation of others, which fact never yet occurred to 
the entire satisfaction of any one, and never will occur, 
because mind is a universe of itself, with a polarity 
above treason. 

We in spirit life sound the tocsin of approval for 
every free thinker, for every mind cut losse from the 
shackles of anybody's say so, unless the thought con- 
veys to the mind evidence of scientific truth, which is 
ever ready to cope with and illustrate any outreach of 
principle deducible to reason. We thank God the 
divine spirit in progress, for the shining light of an 
Ingersoll, the hero that dares to burlesque a myth, al- 
though crowned as a God by the moneyed influence in 
church and state ; dares to claim nature as satisfactory 
evidence that love is the power of the soul, dearer than 
a patchwork of fables from minds at the entrance-way 
to the dome of knowledge, that could only comprehend 
by the hugeness of detail and monstrosity of verbal 



128 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 

show. Who looks at Robert Ingersoll without knowing 
that his soul life is his true and lasting life ? the life 
that he works with day after day, and night after night, 
when thought finds him in the vanguard of the world's 
reformation, pulling down obsolete theories, to prepare 
stable ground for a new prince of peace, that will speak 
to the heart and soul of a living principle, hitherto 
embedded in the ignorance and superstition that made 
thrones possible, that made an overflowing mecca of 
intolerance, the crafty power that submerged the world 
in the dark ages of doubt and despair, when minds 
rioted in the flames of an angry God, and saw what 
little of justice they could comprehend, in the overthrow 
of nations, and the burning of children as the sacrifi- 
cial oder of an avenging God. 

A revolting show is the Bible show of peace on earth 
and good will to man, when it contains more of the 
dagger spirit than any other book before the world to- 
day. And Christ's corner must be its apology as any 
service whatever to the world, and that must serve as a 
love link in the infinite chain of Godly progress, which 
moves from the centre light of father and mother secre- 
tiveness fixed in gestative science, where the mills of 
the Gods are bringing it in its white purity, before the 
minds of the nineteenth century. The century that 
opened its hearing to the voice of the angels, and can 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 129 

never more close up the avenue of communication, 
while time runs a parallel law line with eternity. 

There is no church wide enough in its import of sal- 
vation, to hold the liberal spirit of Robert Ingersoll, 
the pronounced infidel of this era of progress ; the pro- 
nounced sharp-shooter into the ranks of the world's 
theological resting place, as dense and morbid as mat- 
ter without spirit ; when the liberal spirit of the age 
gets through with its sifting process, the Bible will need 
another revision, where nothing will be left but the 
cover, and Christ as the emblematical representation of 
love bound by honor. Whoever shook the hand of 
Ingersoll without feeling in better mood under the 
genial rays of his warm-hearted magnetism ? felt that 
the man held his God within, as the helper to oust the 
iron-clad image that figures so conspicuously with the 
exchequer of church and state. It is safe to here say 
that there is hope for Ingersoll, but none whatever for 
the chemical adhesion of the religious element pervad- 
ing the temple ground of theological Christianity, that 
will sputter perhaps for a few years longer, and finally 
go out on the heels of a Thomas, or with the exit of 
men who dare to be individuals and hold their honor 
above the tenits that constitute their creed. 

When governments make solid ground for the poor 
and churches taxable property, and religion not a flower 
to be sold at any cost, why ministers will come down to 



130 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

the level of their own common sense, and not attempt 
to teach truth until they obtain it, and live it before 
God and man. When Robert Ingersoll sees the other 
side of his globe of individualism, he will realize why- 
he could not stand within the narrow boundary of a 
creed ; will see his spirit manhood ever the leader to 
the grandeur of his conceptions, that can never die, but 
will live in the spaces of God's light, to crown him 
with their truth and freedom of spirit. And so let 
jubilanti flow out on the breezes of a more liberal 
orthodoxy, that the spirit world may join heart and 
hand in removing the hardening crust of materialism, 
settling over the heart of the world's nationality. 

Crumbs from the side-board of truth are feeding all 
liberal minds, or those that dare to investigate in the 
face and eyes of a more liberal Hades that has swamp- 
ed the heart and intellect of past times and periods of 
advancing thought, until minds have cried, Oh ! thou 
storm-king, with nothing but fire and brimstone, how 
long wilt thou be usurper over the God rights of first 
order, and management of purpose ? how long will the 
churches use thee as the bottomless pit, wherein to sink 
their responsibilities, and the sins of an overtaxed na- 
tion struggling to be free, but bound by this power of 
Satan in league with a financial orthodoxy, sprung from 
the old world assumption of horned Gods rearing their 
altars under the sway of might and force. 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 131 

What Lincoln did for the black slavery in the South 
was done under the pressure of angel wisdom and jus- 
tice, and Abraham Lincoln being the instrument on 
which the principle of justice was paramount in his 
system of reconstruction, could not resist the appealing 
voices from the summer land heard in his mediumistic 
soul, could not resist the power that made him sign the 
release from bondage to 4,000,000 slaves, that had been 
for years the upas tree of the South, poisoning its vital 
energies, and flecking heaven with its disgrace. 

Imponderable forces move slowly, but nevertheless 
they move, and so must this heathen crater of hell-fire 
torment, fixed as a scarecrow at the entrance way of 
dogmatic religion, move before the liberal sentiment of 
free thought, voiced from the angel world and received 
by minds stamp-marked with honor, and willing to 
sign a release from the opinionated system of religious 
slavery. My mind wanders back to my self-asserted 
right to think for myself, and I knew from that time 
onward, or until minds grappled the rudiments of truth 
in science, I should be a muddling stick to stir the 
waters of a false religion, because purpose was false, 
and the power of a deceitful purpose is as unstable as 
the wind, and its fellowship with deep thought is utterly 
impossible, if truth stands loyal to principle. 

We in spirit life predicate our assertions on the basic 
ground of a double life, the interior capabilities always 



132 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

preponderate for a double showing of accountable ac- 
tion, which deals with time ever on the outreach to eter- 
nity's encompassment, and ever impelled by the motor 
force of education, the mental influx stamp-faced as 
Deity, and is the Deity in every human soul, self-impel- 
ling and self-absolving, and belongs to the forensic law, 
God of Almighty principle. 

Mind is amber hued, and always reflects its bright- 
ness over surrounding obstacles, wooing an encounter 
for investigation and completeness of research, to make 
mastery of Deity in detail to the comprehension of 
Deity, in the ark size of unlimited principle. 

God grows by the force of the world's education, by 
the force of spiritual law, governing matter and unfold- 
ing the circumference of legal science, the adaptability 
of the social intersexious in nature. Nature is God, 
the demonstrated evidence of spiritual ability to form 
on external principle for convenience and use. Do we 
see with external vision the spiritual law in nature at 
work ? Do we see with the eye, mountains grow, 
valleys deepen and widen ? Do we see the process of 
the trees accumulating grandeur ? and the rose in bud 
open at the kiss of the sun's bright rays, with the orb 
of material fungus ? Oh ! no, earth friends, we only 
see nature as a figment of the great whole, ever in the 
concreteness of science, and ever giving to outward 
sensation the fineness of truine cause. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 133 

God is a spirit. Nature is also a spirit, and the one- 
ness is complete and fixed beyond movement in the 
womb of spiritual gestation. No harm can come to 
God, it is nature that suffers — nature that weeps at the 
mistakes of men ; nature that smiles, nature that we 
meet year in and out, day by day ; no other power 
intervenes from the cradle to the grave but nature true 
and grand, keeping God in her bosom as a harp for the 
world to play tunes upon, and each tune reflects a God 
of a more systematic order, and concrete spiritism, 
that the world may learn that the deluge meant ig- 
norance, the condition of the world when everything 
that was hid in principle must be saved in the ark of 
materialism, or God would suffer in the real estate 
business, and not be able to reproduce things to first 
order, and the flood seemed a wonderful water gap to 
destroy first creation. 

Creation is a term incompatible with reason, because 
it admits of something before nothing, and that con- 
dition is untenable, and cannot, of course, be solvable 
by any method of management. We cannot conceive 
of nothingness, a great void, as the Bible has it, an 
unlimitable space, where nothing found nothing, and 
nothing to begin upon, but God went to work and 
made something. We don't know what first, for the 
Bible does not tell us, or anything, how the creation of 
the world or worlds was managed, but leaves us in 



134 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

doubt as regards methods or means ; therefore leaving 
us on the defensive to test the solidity of a thing con- 
structed out of nothing. 

My belief, based on knowledge, is that this world 
and all other worlds have grown from the neces- 
sity of intensification. Intense motor power must re- 
flect the solvents that produce matter, causing matter 
to become as stable as spirit, and both in the bond of 
unity and friendship, in fact there is no separation ; 
the spirit ever clings to its portion of matter, intensifi- 
cation of spirit etherealize the grosser elements of 
matter and carries into space all that space can deal 
with, or make use of ; and therefore we are ever sure 
of as much of our corporeal body as the spirit can 
assimilate with and take to its fuction of use for the 
broadening purposes of the instellar life and law sys- 
tem : the fundamental principle on which rests the 
symbols of external bearings, preparatory to the spirit's 
full recognition of its inherent rights as a builder, pro- 
tector and purifier of so much of gross material in and 
of science. Science is the most remarkable wheel that 
ever turned on its axis of accountability, and its 
rotundity of conception no mind can ever fathom, no 
God ftan lay a claim to — if that could be, there must 
come an end, and God and man must cease to grow, 
which implies death ; rigor strata from which has grown 
rigor claims that will perish for want of nourishment. 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 135 



CHAPTER XII. 

MAN may arrive at the knowledge of world build- 
ing, be enabled to visit the planets and study 
equation in its highest sense of utility, and become 
grand master of etheical science, and yet space holds 
the unformed secrets that attaches ignorance to man 
and development in nature. No man hath seen God 
and lived, because no mind can grasp the ulterior and 
interior forces of a living principle, balance power is 
not ranged for so broad a scope, and never can be, for 
elongation is the method meter by which nature keeps 
distance from discovery, and keep minds on the qui-vive 
for something new and fresh to the intellect. Science 
doubles herself at every turn in the wheel of causation. 
Cause implies strength in the method of gestation. 
Science is first acted upon by the cause attaching to its 
fulmination. Science is deathless and opaque in princi- 
ple, meeting every want, of the human soul, because 
soul life is scientific life, ever deepening and reaching 
for the eternity of motion, which implies causation. 
We might as well undertake to bottle up the ocean as 
to hold science by the grasp of human understanding, 
because the motor key is sunk in the depths of uni- 
versal brotherhood, and wisdom of purposed order, 



135 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

that the soul may learn its lessons of utilization and 
unite with the harmonical law in nature, to fathom the 
depth and culture the spirit of love. Love is the 
essense of divine order and workmanship ; love im- 
plies equation, centre attraction, centre order and 
centre honor, and is therefore a principle at work, and 
must work in concrete science to the fulfilment of the 
law, which means to the full of its mission as a har- 
monizer, purifier, protector and God over every other 
attribute in the human soul, and in all nature as well, 
for both functions of being have love for the cradle of 
conceivement. 

What college is there to-day that teaches its students 
how to live, how to educate their love natures, how to 
foster the right ambition that will work good in the 
world, how to study nature, and learn of her varied 
emblems of loving order the beauty of purity that are 
speaking sentinels to the human heart, that ambition 
must first crown herself with love before education can 
round out the soul to the fullness of natural design ; if 
we lose in nature we lose in all there is to make loss 
out of ; if we fail to study, we miss what might have 
been attained by application, and growth is retarded, 
time cheated and nature dwarfed. All the lessons we 
learn are good for something. 

The rag man is as necessary as the merchant. If 
some of our lessons leave us tattered in principle, 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. IV 

which surely speaks on the external, we may learn 
from the corrosive marks that waste has begun, and 
that experience, with the wrong implements of labor, 
was the teacher leading the way and opening our eyes 
and mind to the devastation of sin in the practical 
walks of life, and the deduction from that side of life's 
issuer is tattered and torn condition, a necessity to 
grasp a truth from, and obtain depth by decision, 
which is salt to the character, if framed in weakness. 
What college to-day teaches the umpire of reason, 
the graduation of knowledge, the system of thought 
wound into every department of intellectual, social, 
financial and materialistic science, from which springs 
the rubber game that crowns the earthly world of labor ? 
Colleges teach metaphysics in a certain direction in 
whatever a student may choose as an avocation of 
business that he is taught, superficially of course, be- 
cause the right aims and motives are wanting to make 
the science of the knowledge sought, a prayer and 
thanksgiving to the soul. Colleges should go deeper 
in the line of metaphysical science, and first prune and 
cultivate the inner temple, where start the principles 
and aspirations that makes life's work a success or a 
failure ; must say this institution that offers knowledge 
to young men and women, offers standard work for 
future time in the local transaction of every day life 
and being, must perforce of duty regulate motive 



138 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

power ; first see that honor is the corner stone in the 
temple of education you are about to build ; let us see 
that you have the right God in your constitution of 
principles, that can never fail you in any emergency of 
life ; let us see if virtue holds you by the hand day by 
day, and makes peace with a conscience ever ready to 
bar the door against unlawful intruders ; let us see if 
love is a privilege in the soul that will mount the ros- 
trum of effort, before the thought of money debases 
the motive that prompts your systemed work, leaving 
you a beggar in full sight and reach of material gain. 
First seek the kingdom of heaven, which is love ex- 
pressed in works, and all else shall be added thereto, a 
fact in the science of life, and a pearl never to be lost 
sight of. 

Who studies from material sight 
Is lost in doubt, is weak in might ; 
And all the templed thrones of fame 
Will only cling to earthly name ; 
And in the summering of the skies 
All see the death of earth disguise, 
And fain would build from new desire 
A Temple touched with living fire, 
That would so shine with Godly light 
That all would see beyond the night ; 
Beyond the world of earth and and time, 
Where God and science move sublime, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 139 

And double in the work of fame 
Without a thought of what's the name, 
Or what's the creed ; if nature's right, 
Mankind must walk by spirit sight, 

And learn the lessons that are needful to all, that mate- 
rial conditions are the necessities that fit us for the 
eternity of spiritual motion and co-operative labor. 
There is no lesson too long that is needful to the 
human soul, and there is no lesson that comes before 
the soul with its speaking mission, but what in its 
synopsis of detail is a benefit to and enlarger of the 
soul, which learns from experience better than any 
other way, and more in accord with the status of rea- 
son. Systems and worlds are moving on, and man is 
learning that there is no death to the ideal, no death to 
longitude or latitude, no death to circumference, no 
death to air, heat, motion, no death to the starry firma- 
ment that ever speaks grandeur to the human soul, and 
lifts it to the order of its own systemed laws. 

What God gave me I hold science accountable for. 
I hold science as my educator and my guide, my pro- 
pulsive life, my formation and my deflector, my steed 
that bears the natural and the duplex side of relation- 
ary lifehood. I cannot part with science any more 
than I can part with Parker, which I have never at- 
tempted to do, because the man always clings to the 
spirit, saying, We are double, and cannot separate. 



140 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

God and science working out our part of the great 
mystery of human life, and its responsible action on all 
the spheres or worlds, that science may be enabled to 
develope to our senses. I find that I always need my 
outside man, need the Parker external, to bear locomo- 
tive evidence that the interior principle never swerved 
from the creed of honor, never swerved from following 
in the wake of spiritual light, and leaving dogmas, 
superstitions, and all the outside stilts of heathen anti- 
quity that have flourished as saviors, and true symbols 
of fitments for eternity, for the rushing tide of reason 
to bury under its folds of intelligent research, and walk 
from under a cover of darkness, into the sunlight of a 
free religion, not inbound by dollars and cents, by 
church monopoly, by priests purring of clerical power, 
or any material click w r ork, that will make religion hunt 
a cover to hide its head of reason under, and reach for 
a creed to obtain landmark and respectability from. I 
never went to Jesus with any of my sins, but have often 
said to Parker : Cleanse your soul from all that your 
best sense of right cannot hold to, and assimilate with, 
and I find that when I let go of this bugbear called 
sin, in whatever shape it may come before me, I have 
done away with the necessity of any other savior, ex- 
cept the scientific God-principle at work in my own 
soul as leveler and purifier of conditional circum- 
stances. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 141 

Colleges have a broad work to do in the method- 
house of inductive science, in the promotion of the 
right principles governing the basic structure of all 
education, of all departments of business, of all the 
exigences of life's labors, duties and pleasures. 

God speaks first and last to the soul, but it is the 
voice of principle to the soul of conscience hearing, 
and man never can escape the harmony of its sound, 
be it ever so latent, and seemingly afar off ; it comes as 
sound to the ear that has long been deaf, and under 
the paralyzing influence of deadening matter. 

There is a rift in the cloud of time, and spiritualism 
top-lighted by free thought will save the world from 
rank infidelity, which has been the trailing ghost since 
time immemorial, or since the method of salvation took 
form in book, and offered so much room for speculative 
theory, which touched everything but the core of the 
apple, the demonstrative fact of immortality fixed in 
the globe of science, the hereditary appendage that no 
amount of theorizing can disturb, or move from its just 
claim to truth. Why build our spiritual temple on a 
false basis, on a material foundation, whose shadow is 
as fleeting as the wind ? Whose every ray of change 
betokens dissolution, betokens the builder and destroy- 
er, the umpire of the spirit over the grosser conditions 
of matter, and the subtlety of its movement proves its 
scientific origin, its power and truth, proves that there 



142 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

can be no death, so long as spirit is at the helm of 
materialistic duty, the most pungent architect and skil- 
ful disintegrater. 

Why should man be afraid of law, the integral law 
that nature deals with continually, and is ever our God 
and guide, our revelator and broadcast censor, re- 
flector, and preserver ? Why afraid of death, nature's 
sleepwalker, that liberates the spirit when danger comes 
to the body, and it can no longer serve in the work to 
be done by the spirit ? O ye ! of little faith, when ter- 
ror comes over you at the thought of dying, when it is 
but nature at work to liberate the spirit from its bond- 
age of clay, placing it in the better condition of radia- 
tion, and freedom of movement. O ye ! of little faith, 
when you cannot trust your Bible God with the day of 
your death, that presided at the hour of your birth, and 
to whom you reach to continually, as a myth in the air, 
and from whom you never receive a response, however 
urgent your request may be. O ye ! of little faith, 
when you cannot trust yourself with the life given to 
you, through and by the spiritual harvester in the 
method-house of concrete science, and hold and keep 
it in so true a light that death will be but the spanning- 
bridge from the shadowy to the real. Oh ! how glori- 
ous is the morn of the resurrection from darkness to 
the sunshine of spiritual truth and light. Never sing 
psalms at funerals, or dirges to the supposed in prison, 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 143 

but ever jubilanti on the uprising key of a soul's lib- 
eration and freedom from death. 

O ye prophets ! sages and learned men of the East, 
teach how to live, and death will come to the rescue 
most beautifully — the spirit finding its own in the gulf 
stream of a broader life. 

Spirit life is the only life there is, the only life mani- 
fested in all the occult forces of nature, the only life 
that moves for order and circumference, the only life to 
prove a God in and of the only life that God in nature 
cleaves to and assimilates with, for procreation and 
radiation of principle. 

We cannot let go of life ; it is an utter impossibility. 
Life is encased in nebulous form ; it is the eternal fric- 
tion force of heat and cold, fire and water, light and 
darkness, principle and practice, love and hate, God 
and man, demon and angel, and must perforce work on 
the endless chain of systematized spirituality, that loses 
nothing, but changes its form of work evenly and per- 
petually ; as Dryden says : 

" Deep in the woof of human life, all nature nestles 
in confiding trust, and finds an undeveloped page in 
every turning leaf, that will not let us pause, or cease 
to think, or cease to be, or cease to grapple with proud 
Deity." 

Let us put death so far away from us that it cannot 
enter our thoughts, cannot enter a home on earth, can- 



144 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

not place a soul in stillness, although it may give the 
body for the enrichment of nature's soil, to help matter 
elongate matter, or help nature to elongate the princi- 
ple of give and take, the method in concrete science 
whereby the glory of nature is obtained and progress 
secured without a doubt, through that same process of 
nature's distilling forces or essences, that always takes 
step for a more etherealized condition. 

Man is sure to resurrect himself, cannot be avoided, 
cannot be gainsayed, being a law in the ether house of 
science ; and man's necessity brings him to the point 
of accepted terms. The only point of law that God 
and man have ever split upon, is the issues of life and 
death, which might have been settled amicably and sat- 
isfactorily to judgment and the best types of sense, if 
man had found the right God in the constitution of na- 
ture, and had studied that God instead of the Jehovah 
of historical claim, that has been so swayed by parti 
spitit, and doubled and twisted so many times, by so 
many minds, that to-day the impress is lost to the best 
spiritualized condition of humanity, that feels that 
death has lost its sting, and that God's wrath was but 
the foam on the vast sea of human ignorance ; which a 
knowledge of the God principle in scientific nature will 
sweep to the breezes that usher in the new wave of 
wisdom gained from spirit power, and seeking, what 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 145 

Christ sought, the hearts of the people to make sure its 
advent, and bold its stay. 

I am no more prepared to give up life than I was 
when earth released her claim to my structured form. 
No more willing to give up study, to give up mental 
research, for soul enlightment and ingrafting keepsakes 
than when time claimed my theological assumptions, 
which were as sounding brass to the truth I now 
possess, and to the truth that I mean to make manifest 
and felt in its extremest measure of tangible evidence. 



146 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE world is asking as never before for its lost 
ones, for those that have been laid away under 
the sanctified redemption of priestly effort, asking for 
the fulfilment of that hope that went out in almost 
mental darkness, for the evidence to make sure that 
the loved live and cannot die, because God lives and 
cannot die, although history perish by the will and 
voice of the people. Life is an entity claiming posses- 
sion and progression ; and man is the standard princi- 
ple for Godly effort in the universe law of concrete 
science. Life is a factor whose point of accretion is 
fixed in the everlasting method-wells of procreative 
genesis, and man's effort to establish a creed on the 
fundamental principles of nature, whereby the salvation 
of the human soul can leak through, is a preposterous 
fiction that the nineteenth century are feeling ashamed 
of, and are secretly and openly hugging the advance 
light of spirit reunion, that says : " I came, I saw, and 
have conquered," and am the trustee over my own 
estate of life, that I hold above any spurious title, and 
am learning its power adjustability to suit all of time 
and circumstance. 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 147 

Can we ask anything more of God than the principle 
itself ? which we have always been in possession of, 
and must ever hold to and develop from. Finding 
God and losing self in every advance of mental 
achievement, we are as nothing to ourselves, but can 
be as a God to every other person, for the principle of 
self destroys itself, and the bottom land of despair is 
soon in sight, where the angel of discord bars the door 
to love and consequent progress. I cannot round out 
my own nature, cultivate, purify and perfect my own 
soul unless I come within the love sphere of human 
life and existence, come into cooperative work, for the 
broadening of God and the elimination of principle ; 
come under the bond of friendship with all of ex- 
pressed life, and do my best endeavor to find the aim 
and motive in propulsive being, from the standpoint of 
nature's working, under the sway of a universal wisdom, 
in the bosom of a universal love, termed God and 
Science. Love is all there is of God, nature, or man. 
We cannot go beyond it, cannot stop short of its full 
attainment, and its expression is ever in accord with its 
growth of development. 

Do you think there would be a wreck on earth to- 
day if love stood firm at the citadel of duty ? Would 
there be a homeless child ? a degraded woman ? a fallen 
man ? a mourning world ? if love, expressed in works, 



148 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

was the standing shield of Godly strength, hoisted over 
the nation or nations. 

The angels are working as never before for the up- 
rising of earth, because the minds of earth are turning 
to the light of spiritual truth, and must be strengthened 
by the power of substantial evidence, to know that 
man's life runs parallel with God's, and can only cease 
when God ceases to express in nature. 

The grandest theme for mind to range over is life, 
sweet life, the blossoming breath of God ; the fragrance 
of which the world has yet to feel in its fullness of 
exhilerating grandeur. What to man if he gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul in the pursuit of so 
nefarious a business ? What can the world be to human- 
ity if its soul-life in the heart pulsing of universal 
brotherhood be turned to sordid avarice, wearing the 
cap of mammon, and bowing to the surface king of 
materialistic shadowing ? What is man but a God in 
embryo, not capable when full toned in moral and in- 
tellectual integrity to say, " I own one dollar in the 
bickering house of worldly finance, that shapes itself to 
the growth of mind in matter, or the spirituality in the 
growing heart of a national civilization that cannot 
place a finger of ownership on anything in nature that 
belongs in spirituality of a national or broadcast God- 
ism. 

Man is a fool to take a fool's stand, and weigh a 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 149 

fool's weight in the scales of intellectual science, that 
always drop bar at the fullness of spiritual weight, and 
weighs men and women, worlds and systems of worlds 
with an eveness and surety of natural purpose that 
cannot leave a doubt in the mind of a thinker regard- 
ing the truthfulness of cause and effect, and its justice 
poise in the bosom of a spiritual eliminator — a God if 
you will — but a God in the love nest of inverse 
traversing. Man must feel this all pervading love, this 
well spring of happiness that swallows up all selfish- 
ness, leaving the mind free and God-like, and in its 
richness of building talent. God and man are one in 
love, one in the divinity of purpose, one in the solution 
of life's mysteries, one in the defence of truth, and one 
for time and eternity ; at birth and in death the one 
love cord draws to centre gravity and motion all 
abiding is love, all cherishing and protecting in its 
heart-beat of motion, and is the ever filling fountain 
where sinners loose their guilty stains and find redeem- 
ing care. 

God bless the world for its missionary spirit that has 
wrought redeeming grace wherever its love has taken 
root in the active duties and details of every day life, 
the only life we are sure of, and the only life we can 
master to advantage and make sure of its results. I 
never done a deed in my life, good, bad or indifferent, 
but what its present status of worth placed my soul in 



150 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

the concordant element of agreement or disagreement 
with its reflex action on growth and approvement of 
conscience. 

Hudibras steeped his soul in the fumes of never 
ending doubt and labored to establish truths he could 
pick flaws with, to protect his genius and absolve his 
soul from idleness. Hudibras' theory is as old as God, 
and lives to-day in the demarcation of falsity and truth, 
good and evil as paramount counters for time and 
eternity. 

We cannot cris-cross a principle with any degree of 
satisfaction or hope of covering it up, for God has em- 
paneled a jury of feelers to detect the synthony of its 
appeal and the fineness of its touch, and therefore the 
word of God is less than the principle, which gave light 
to the word, making a show and glitter over a truth 
which it is trying to obscure from the light of reason. 
Geology is a grander study than the word of God, for 
Geology is a primate from the bosom of a living princi- 
ple, and cannot be gainsayed or placed in the brain as 
a doubt, unless we doubt all fundamental principle, and 
count the world as a shadow, or a myth, before the 
function of reason and cultured understanding. Geo- 
logy lifts a head of might and absolute right before 
Grecian history ; the " I Am " of supernatural pilfering 
before the Mahomedan zephyr of God in the disguise 
of solar friction, catering man-like to caste, color and 



TEE LESSONS OF TEE AGES. 151 

finance. Geology stands before the upright endorse- 
ment of man before God found a name in history, or 
appealed for name or statue. Geology is the base 
brain where system finds its evolving spirit that presses 
to the front for progressive unfoldment, as a leaf from 
a bud, a bud from a twig, a twig from a limb, a limb 
from a tree, and a tree from the strata house of geolog- 
ical keepsakes, that holds God as the spirit of elimina- 
tion, but with any other name would serve all things as 
well. 

While we seek amidst earth's treasures, 

Find we Ged in fullest measures ; 

find the alpha and omega of all systemed work ; find 
that God is growing with humanity, is part and parcel 
of humanity, and never will change unless humanity 
changes, which must be on the love side of motion to 
build a temple of human strength with Godly purpose, 
worthy of the kingdom of heaven, whose base will 
always rest on the bottom shores of time, where in- 
stinct and reason cope with the power of inspiration to 
build Gods Continually, least the old one become 
obsolete, and no longer serviceable as the top-light 
guiding humanity to better prospects, from a better un- 
derstanding of heaven and hell, twin sisters for time and 
eternity, doing their work evenly, harmoniously and in 
accord with nature's divine revealments to man. Man 
is nature's work, and God comes under the same law 



152 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

of natural order, and cannot gainsay the equilibrium of 
united principle and action, that go hand in hand for 
duty and accountability. 

If amid life's growing mission 
We are stranded on life's sea, 

God and nature hold ambition 
For what is, and is to be. 

And, struggle which ever way we will, the bond of 
forensic law holds us firm to natural order and peace 
with God. Therefore let us rest in the arc of divine 
wisdom ; let nature hold us by the firm hand of 
accountability, and find no flaws in us when we live 
true to her mission. 

The lessons of each age have taught us more wisdom, 
have taught us the grandeur of change, the beauty of 
effort to get nearer to the centre light of liberalization, 
the fallen star that crowns where it conquers, and leads 
the mind to willingness and obedience to search for 
truth in whatever channel it may be found to lead us 
evenly to the realm of a natural glory which is satis- 
faction as the result of our labor. 

We see to-day the shimmering lights from off the 
altar of spiritual harmonies ; and earth must listen for 
the voicing that follows in the wake of advancing 
thought, and will seriously disturb the setting hen of 
ministerial popularity, struggling to maintain the old 
nest egg of heathen idolatry ; but the whip of common 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 153 

sense, aided by the light of spirit communion, is doing 
its work most effectually, and the funeral procession of 
old orthodoxy is passing gradually by, while the mourn- 
ers take their seats in the new church of Free Thought, 
with a perfect content and a smile that the old dogma 
of hell-fire has burned itself to ashes by its corruption 
of principle and worldliness of methodical dealing with 
nations and individuals. 

We are told in spirit life that the hour-hand of pro- 
gress is sadly disturbing the Jesuits, and there is likely 
to be a war in heaven, but the mustering process must 
take place on earth, where freedom is lifting her torch 
for reconstruction, and, if war ensues, every depart- 
ment of the world's dishonest motive power will be 
searched out, and its terminus of action shall surely be 
reached and dealt with according to the growth and 
force of the world's spirit, aided by the co-operation of 
spirits out of prison, laboring to establish a monarchy 
in the freedom and justice of the world's people, that 
the spirit world so much in expression may be even 
handed and one in purpose with the workings of earth. 

Spirit communion must at length drift out of its one- 
handed game, where the dollar fixes the type of its 
origin, and places the medium by the ghoul of dishonest 
bickering that loses the sacredness of its mission by 
its treading on the heels of orthodoxy, with its show of 
heavenly truths on the basis of a money corruption ; 



154 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 

and thus the world's mediums are forced into this net 
of money power, and drawn to the shore of rank 
materialism, where its spiritual spring is almost hid 
from sight and hearing by the selfishness of the world 
they cannot beat against and retain the respectability 
of its monied umpire. 

When will the world protect its mediums with love ? 
letting the money come as a natural consequence to 
foster the tru f h which is trying to express itself, that 
all may be bettered and made happy by the return of 
the angels under a new bond of friendship and protect- 
ing care. I have worked largely with mediums of time, 
for knowing all the truth, I have been anxious to give 
it to all ; and I have found that the circumstances and 
conditions surrounding each one have dwarfed my 
efforts, and made lame my endeavors to give my best 
thoughts to the world ; but time is more lenient than 
in by gone days, and therefore hope blends with my 
every triumph, and I am sure to be recognized and 
held by the hand of friendship and former love. 

So dear to my heart is my mission of duty that I 
must claim the right to confiscate individual primates, 
and unite in harmony the forces that I need to make 
standard sequence before the bar of the world's judg- 
ment and truthful approval. I want no squirming to 
parti spirit or factional gain ground, but I want the fact 
of my reappearance established on the firm basis of the 



THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 155 

knowledge which I obtained in Jupiter to reinstate my- 
self under the right blending of spirit with matter, with 
the semblance of flesh and blood, and hold firm to that 
attitude as long as centre gravity can cling to the ele- 
ments at work and become a dissolving view, when 
necessary to the welfare of spirit and mortal, or 
mortals, as the case may be. 

I must try my skill at reconstruction ; and if I fail, I 
fail on the road to knowledge, and must therefore beg 
the world to excuse me for trying to prove my immor- 
tality in the face and eyes of my olden infidelity, run- 
ning counter to church fellowship, and placed me in 
the seething box of public condemnation, to find, if I 
could, one star of hope to light my weary soul beyond 
the portals of the tomb. I know that I am a scape- 
goat from the confines of creed, but I am head and 
shoulders above creed in my light-house of individual 
freedom to work for humanity and the indwelling spirit 
of progress, with the ultimate recovery from sin. 

I challenge any minister on earth to-day to prove the 
immortality of the soul from the utterings of the Bible. 
Challenge the wisdom of the world to prove that 
Christ's mission was anything but a spiritual mission 
to prove his identity and resurrection under the forces 
of natural law, and to prove also that flesh and blood 
could not enter the kingdom of heaven, but that mind 



156 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 

could formulate a relationary atmosphere by the use of 
mortal help to reappear in tangible conformity to its 
past condition of individual materiality, and therefore 
support by actual demonstration his saying that : 
" If I go from your midst I will surely come again." 
Now if it was proved eighteen hundred years ago 
to the world's satisfaction that Christ stood on the 
mount of transfiguration, meaning spiritual attain- 
ment, and proved himself free from death, the cir- 
cumstance also proves that I am under the same 
law with Christ, and can use the Christ method, when 
supported by the right mediumistic element, as he 
surely was ; and every other returned messenger has 
found the helping hand on earth to bring the glad 
tidings of great joy, which is life everlasting and in 
harmony of divine action to spirits in the bond house 
of clay. 

I only know that Christ materialized from the fact 
that I possess the same qualifications myself, and must 
prove it to make it a truth in history, and therefore a 
fact in science. Jesus' fact contained the whole scope 
of Bible service to the world, and is the star crowning 
the history of Greek mythology ; the illerate literature 
that proves nothing but ignorance and darkened con- 
dition from that same cause. 

My hemisphere of action is about drawing to a 



THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 157 

close in the embodiment of thought in book form 
with this instrument of control. But I hope the world 
will enlarge on its basis of friendship, and meet me in 
materialization, if I still cling to the fact of a natural 
salvation, primated in God and nature, or divine pur- 
pose and scientific skill, which holds me beyond the 
power of any deceptive work, and all the fraudulent 
designs of earth cannot pinch back my golden medal 
of spiritual life. 

Therefore, friends of earth, farewell for a time, as I 
shall surely follow on the lead of these lessons, and 
claim myself a resurrected man, with nothing but love 
for humanity and truth for God, nothing but life to 
return with, circumstance to control, good to accom- 
plish, and that peace to restore which Christ tried to 
leave with the people, but failed for lack of confidence 
on the part of the people ; but now confidence is being 
restored, and Christ's method of reincarnation is being 
understood and pinned to the foretop of reason, where 
its consistency with natural order and intelligent 
thought must find the mystery of life's workings and 
harmony of movement. 

So great is God, so glorious and so true, I would not 
doubt the mission of such grandeured a power. I 
would not change the death scene ; would not bring my 
mind to shudder at one single mandate from an all 



158 THE LESS ON S OF THE AGES. 

wise potent being that hangs a jeweled hold upon the 
orb of space, and rocks in cradled mystery the sun- 
tide beat of love and life. 

I would not rake amidst the embers of the past 
To find the olden Britton of my future fame, 
But I would stand again on earth, a spirit man, 
And claim anew my olden name ; 

And count my work but feebly done 
Unless I have the whole world won. 

Theodore Parker. 

Earth's finale is to be the golden wedding with 
eternity. 



APPENDIX 



IS SPIRITUALISM A REFORM IN ITS TENDENCY OF 
MOVEMENT ? 

Many are asking : What has Spiritualism done as a 
purifier and perfector of the human soul after a 
sourjourn of thirty-four years, in a world whose suction 
quill of evangelical hope had been attached to the 
Bible, and found it wanting in strength of demonstra- 
tive evidence to satisfy the growing need of the nine- 
teenth century ? What has Spiritualism done to make 
life better, humanity grander, and God understood with 
its light of life over the sheer darkness of the past? 
Has it succored more of the needy than the churches ? 
Has it broadened a platform of charity, killed the ser- 
pent of selfishness, sent out the tiger of reform, carrying 
the love taper of a more spiritual afflatus to delve 
deeper in the human heart to find the casta deva of 
immortal worth, the soul function that God and Spirit- 
ualism are holding before the crib of ancient material- 
ism ? Has it done all this with its golden medal of 
truth attached to the key of a broad progressive life ? 
Has it bound Satan with a bright cord of love, at- 
tached to the brain-work of common sense, and fast- 



160 APPENDIX. 



ened to the growing key of education ? Has it said 
clown with the traitor, priest-craft, and up with the blue 
flag of spiritual liberty, which must wave over all the 
broadening issues of life ; and men and women must 
join hands and hearts for a work of love, unselfish 
Christ permeated, holding Christianity out to the world, 
free and untrammeled, without even the attachment of 
an ism to stay its progress or cramp its influence ? 

Spiritualism means everything or nothing — means 
all of God and science as well — means spirit above 
matter, therefore upholding matter by the shrewd cord 
of elongation that attaches to both spirit and matter, 
if indeed there is a separation distinct from a purpose 
in the science of Almighty law. 

Spiritualism is either a graft of a better fruit on to 
the old tree of orthodoxy, or it is a finality in the science 
of life proper, and cannot be gainsayed, overcome, or 
placed in the pool of the world's unbelief, but must in 
perforce of its claims become the tree of knowledge, 
placed in the broadening garden of the human mind, 
that it may base its knowledge of human life on facts 
gained from no ism, but from a mastery of science in 
her vastness of conception and ideality of purpose, in 
bringing back our loved and gone. 

Spiritualism must not rest as an ism — must not 
cling to its tests as a finality, in whatever shape or 
coloring they may assume, but must delve with its 



APPENDIX. 161 



lever of living strength to reach all the God there is, 
ever was or can be — and that is the love God of 
scientific principle immersed in the human heart, to 
bring God to a complete understanding when reason 
studies from cause to effect, and angels bring their 
credentials of unlimited power, and the world sees 
the rottenness of its selfishness and ungodlike pro- 
ceedings. 

The churches have worked under the light of faith, 
and have done many charitable deeds for the needy of 
their fold that would put to shame the works of those 
claiming to have the knowledge of the most beautiful 
truth that could bless the soul of man, and should 
from its force of beauty awaken every soul in posses- 
sion of its great privilege — awaken it to the grandeur 
of its action and sublimity of a love purpose that must 
strengthen human hearts, and invite God to witness his 
works on earth ; and that every soul may realize the 
fact that beautiful homes are only builded in the at- 
mosphere of outflowing and unselfish demonstrations, 
of spirits out of prison, that must eventually make 
more of reform than a sound, or a piping to create a 
monopoly for selfish scheming and money encompass- 
ment. Reform in its true sense is the base principle 
of God — the mill that grinds slowly but sure, exceed- 
ingly sure — and will top-light the world when love 
says to money, you are a usurper if you claim to do 



162 APPENDIX. 



anything but God's work — claim anything but your 
right to liberate, educate and make happy the human 
heart, which is God's temple for reconstruction, and is 
an orb in space and a world in motion, and must ever 
draw on the exchequer of earth to elongate the princi- 
ple of humanitarianism as broad as God and old as 
science, or as broad as love and old as equation : the 
pillar on which rests the science of world building. 
Love must yet assume the consequence of money, and 
do the work God intended — foreordained — a fact in 
the law of justice, and a star in the Galaxy of mental 
motion, and must shine in its fullnes of glory over 
every soul-cry reaching for light to make better con- 
ditions. Spiritualism must mean more than a tune of 
melody from the angels, to prepare us for a glory that 
we have never worked out while yet in the form. Oh, 
no, friends of time, Spiritualism means head and soul 
endeavor to elongate good by the force of human need 
through the soul light of revealed religion. I tried to 
do my work in Boston and elsewhere free from the 
thraldom of an ism or creed, but found that the black- 
mail of rampant sectarianism would not let me suffer 
for my own legitimate folly, but punctured me with the 
church quill of disapproval, until my soul cried out for 
more religion, or less of God, as seen in the burning 
bush of Mosaic reign and heathen tendency. 

I heard my medium say today that if Theodore 



APPENDIX. 163 



Parker were to materialize here in Boston, he would 
find the sentiment and expression of the people very 
different from what it was when he stood with declining 
health before the minds he was seeking to feed with 
the fresher grains of a more spiritual truth, and I said 
in my soul : " Amen ; your heart of confidence is un- 
bounded in Theodore Parker's soul of honest purpose," 
and I feel that I must speak from a newer form, and 
from a broader platform of knowledge, and feel myself 
safe within church or out, as the case may be of pre- 
sentation. So much for the growing liberty of thought, 
that will open the way for my reappearance, and pro- 
claim the spirit's mission in its orbit of scientific 
evolvement. My mind can never capsize or go under 
a deluge of darkness where God will fail to claim his 
own. 

Spiritualism has crowned herself with a voice from 
heaven, and now let us, in and out of the form, work 
in harmony with the voicings that proclaim the sup- 
posed dead well cared for, and under the banner of a 
broadening love principle, while our duty and care is 
with the sufferers of earth, in their physical and mental 
disabilities. 

The world holds enough for all, and the unfoldment 
of the spirit will bring all there is in the earth to man's 
receptive faculties, and he must see that labor is greater 
than money ; that money as an end is a devil at bay, 



164 APPENDIX. 



ever howling at the, Get more within, without a thought 
or care of how many may suffer from the unholy gain 
of the miser spirit that shows to-day in every financial 
department of the world's dealing. 

How long, oh ! how long will the spirit cry for equal- 
ity, and for love, — before protector of money — until 
it can assume the full status and consequence of illegal 
power, the deadening fetus that creates the worm that 
never dies, and if allowed scope will eat away the 
spirit of the living God, established at the forum of all 
conceivement, bearing its mission meekly, with but four 
letters to sound its title clear, to work ahead of any 
other known power in heaven or on earth. Love, like 
a monarch, will build a larger corporation of individual 
interest than money ever dare to assume, unaided by 
the legal responsibility of love, and will assume more 
territory when men and women say : Get thee behind 
me Satan, thou money God. I would let the sweet 
spirit of love speak to my heart and fulminate a pur- 
pose of labor that angels can voice heaven with, and 
feel a refrain of approval. 

God sought to do the best with truth, 
But found old age still clung to youth, 
And that the power of love's full reign 
Would be unblessed, till freedom gained 
Her right to bring the human soul 
Under the sway of love's control, 



APPENDIX. 165 



And make the finance of the land 

Bend at the will of love's command ; 

That will in time see banking schemes, 

The full effect of devils' dreams, 

That had no better work to do 

Than taking one and counting two, 

And felt no shivering at their toes, 

But merely stopped to blow their nose, 

And in an off-hand, careless way 

Says, there's a bonus now to pay ; 

And when you've cancelled all your money 

You'll find you have been caught with honey, 

And we're the bees within the hive 

That do men of their money shrive, 

For fear the miser in the soul 

Might get at last too strong a hold, 

Counting his money as his God, 

And yet not worth one heart-felt sob, 

That reaches to the heart of others 

And loving says : we're sisters, brothers ; 

And God holds justice by the hand, 

Sustained in full by angel band, 

And in the growing light of truth 

Old age must clear herself from youth, 

And in her rough Old money suit 

Must stand a power entirely mute ; 

While love and labor join heart and hand 

For a broadening work throughout the land. 

Spiritualism as an ism is in a bankrupt condition, 
claiming to do more than it performs — claiming to 



166 APPENDIX. 



make hearts happy and homes secure by its great lati- 
tude of love-talk, that we do not see in any quarter of 
the globe acted out to make security of living from the 
principles claiming the ism. I hope in another half 
dozen of years Spiritualism will popularize itself by 
doing something worthy of its advent and truth-seeking 
purpose, if it is nothing more than to colonize for the 
demonstrations, that are only awaiting the movement 
of earth to harmonize in band communities for a work 
and love feast with the angels. The truth, aided by 
light, will make free and enlarge our spiritual vision 
that the fact may become apparent to all that there can 
be no claimship to land, no monoply of money, no 
starving poor, no ungodly rich that believe in the sur- 
vival of a democratic money government, that would 
tread on the heels of Old Europe, causing her prophecy 
to become true, that America would lean to a money 
power before the decade of the nineteenth century, 
but did not see, and therefore could not prophesy that 
the angel world would lash this money God until justice 
was restored and men learn the falsity of their position, 
and were willing to surrender old money bags, at the 
Sumpter of a nation's honor, that will hold its own in 
the scales of the world's progress. Spiritualism must 
reform herself before she is in the possession of the 
capacity to reform any other ism or set of isms that 
are trying their best to steer ahead with as little of 



APPENDIX 167 



hell-fire as they can save sinners from, and reach 
heaven with. The churches contain better mediums 
to-day than the ranks of Spiritualism. You ask how 
that can be? — simply because they are protected. 
Their religion claims for them a home. Remember, 
the Church contains a Beecher, and has covered a 
Thomas, a Wilberforce, a Channing and a Chapin, 
and I might cite many a mediumistic light that has 
gone down under the friendly cover of church and 
creed — and through that friendship and protecting 
care have these mediums grown strong and able dis- 
seminators of the truths entrusted with them. There 
are but few speakers in the ranks of Spiritualism that 
can hold firm footing and reliable sequence in the 
avenues open for their reception : simply because there 
is no protection in the ism, or the spirit displayed to- 
wards sensatives or those undergoing development. 

Plymouth Church has made its Beecher — the love 
element from such a body of disciples gave to the man 
the power of his bearing and the magnetism of his 
presence and utterances that have cleared many a soul 
from the fetich of hell-fire, and through that upholding 
power of love has he become a disintegrater and 
leader ; and will eventually stand as free as his ges- 
tures proclaim him to be. 

The shoulders of time are loaded with errors, sin 
marks of depraved conditions, that should have been 



168 APPENDIX. 



in a measure obliterated, if the churches were doing 
the best that could be done with their religion at top- 
mast and above board ; a position that Spiritualism 
must take to do her work evenly and well. We want 
no hiding lights — no skimming round this modern 
glory with eyes half shut, and ears refusing to hear 
anything about it, if policy is the governing motive to 
the would be hider from truth. Let us have earnest 
work, and plenty of it, in the right and true direction. 
Let us see if the advent of Spiritualism and its pro- 
gressive unfoldments will meddle with and help to 
destroy this liquid crater of hell-fire, the intoxicating 
beverages that are destroying the manhood of the 
nation. Let us see if women will become leaders, if 
necessary, and with their mother hearts plead as for 
their lives for the modification and thorough reforma- 
tion of this liquor traffic, that needs a scourging from 
the best efforts of noble men and women, who must 
see the ruin it is causing from its free and unchecked 
license, and woe be unto the idlers in the broad fields 
of the world's commune — be they creedists or free 
and enlightened thinkers ; all are responsible for the 
bivouac of a monster so dreaded by mothers, sisters 
and wives of the land ; and men who are strong to 
battle against its temptation shudder in contemplation 
of its increasing strength and power. Will Spiritual- 
ists lift a voice to stay its ubiquity of motion and legal 



APPENDIX. 169 



position, and thereby show something that Spiritualism 
has done for humanity's benefit, notwithstanding the 
cry : What has it done to show its heavenly origin and 
beneficence of purpose toward's spiritualizing earthly 
conditions, that the love-star of hope may shine with a 
newer lustre, and hearts be welded together for a work 
of duty which must ever be a loving and fascinating 
service, from which the soul grows strong and God-like. 
Why, in all these years of Church democrary and 
flooded power, if they possessed the working and true 
spirit of Christ that their religion is labeled with, why 
has our police force gained in numbers, and harden- 
ing of clubs, in every city in the land, whose reaching 
spires proclaim modern Christianity, and which should 
be able with its Spurgeon-like strength to lessen the 
necessity of policemen carrying weapons of heathen- 
like proclivities, but which do not grace the walks of 
heathen life, owing to their spirit of frendship and 
courtesy, two love links that should unite the interests 
of all nations, making a brother and sisterhood of 
principles that would in time make whole the human 
heart, and then people could walk free and unmolested 
in country and city, in midday or darkest night, for the 
angel of love would ever be the presiding picket on 
duty ; and angel forces would be as tangible as the 
sunshine and rain beats of earthly expectation and 
reality. 



170 APPEXDIX. 



At present there is a wide amount of talk in regard 
to homes for poor and disabled mediums, that need 
the protecting care of a home, after serving the public 
with the best they had from spirit life, and perhaps 
receiving in return a sneer and pittance that would 
imply beggary, stamped with a gift mark from heaven, 
and which the world is doubtful about, and not willing 
to pay for, for fear they might be classed with the 
Spiritualists, and felt willing to pay tithes for a peep at 
the other side of life — or perhaps selfishness stays the 
current of sympathy, and what seems to be every- 
body's business finally results in nobody's ; and thus 
one after another sister or brother goes down into the 
uncertainty of the world's protection, becoming reck- 
less, wishing for death, and yet afraid to die. Ah, 
world, these are some of the conditions you give to 
your workers, and offer to the angels, expecting the 
full bloom of spiritual truth shall be offered unto you, 
which never can be until your mind is willing to act in 
freedom and love. We in spirit life hope that homes 
for all of earth's needy may be built on a broader 
foundation of solid principles than now, and what goes 
before the public as homes for the needy and unpro- 
tected may be true in the constitutional principle and 
effort to be free to those not possessing means or in- 
fluence. It would seem at the present that all human- 
itarian objects and reforms in the ranks of the would 



APPENDIX. 171 



be liberators and reformers are so shabby and un- 
reliable that thinking people are wondering why these 
voicings from heaven do not make people more truth- 
ful, honest and therefore reliable, more sympathetic, 
loving and kind, more protecting in their circum- 
ference of influence and dealings with life's duties. 
Why are Spiritualists so idle about these all important 
questions of reform ? Why start institutions implying 
to the public and the weary hopers for something good 
and true that will meet and fill their condition of wants, 
on a near approach to, and familiarity with, find that 
the public is humbugged, and the sufferers made to feel 
their dependence and want of a money friendship ? 
Why is Boston idle in this matter of a spiritualized 
home ? the hub where isms have flourished, and 
talk has found embodiment in the classified bond of 
creed, and many a noble work has found important 
foothold and elaboration, while thousands have been 
cared for and benefitted therefrom. What have the 
Spiritualists of Boston to show with their claim of 
spiritual enlightment as a free institution of benevo- 
lence and growing power, supported by an organized 
interest to do a humanitarian work, and not pauperize 
the term Spiritualism as in and about the good old hub 
that winds the spiritualistic element around its shaft of 
uprising power? Let Spiritualism crown herself with 
a home that will be a blessing to Boston — a Bethesda 



172 APPENDIX. 



of spiritual moment, that will strike every beholder 
with the truth of its claim, where healing will be done 
through the power of love, and where sympathy will be 
the golden shield that will protect the crown of its 
offering. 

Spiritualists homes, under the government and con- 
trol of the Spiritualist at work, are too poorly clad 
with the aura of friendship, and too purse poor in or- 
ganized ability to form a standard and growing institu- 
tion, where all branches of industry might be carried 
on under the significance of healing to mind and body. 
The mind needs to be in a flourishing and happy con- 
dition before the body can awaken from stupor and 
inaction, and take part in its resurrection from decay 
while yet stamped with life. There should be a band 
of healers in every institution that offers healing to the 
world, and the band should throw its force, united with 
its spirit-force, around the sensitive seeking help; all 
jealously should be kept at bay ; all feeling of antagon- 
ism should be stultified and not allowed to grow, while 
harmony must be the brass band to usher in the pow- 
er of inspiration — the healing afflatus that makes 
whole the soul and body. Barking never hurts a dog, 
but is warning of the dog's presence ; and so this talking 
of reforms shows that the spirit is in the atmosphere, 
and must awaken from its talking condition to take 
part in active duty and work. Every human soul has 



APPENDIX. 173 



its mission to perform, and sooner or later it realizes 
the fact, and also realizes that it is better to do its 
earth mission while in the body than to be forced to 
return in spirit and labor through other people's 
idiosyncrasies. Those in earth life who live in the 
sphere of duty and accountability of purpose and 
action live nearest to the equation of science, live 
nearest to the Deity in embryotic condition, and live in 
the high-toned atmosphere of purity and Godly endorse- 
ment of growth and accountability. Of course Spiritual- 
ism must learn to walk before it can climb, its modern 
childhood is past the age of thirty years, and we are 
now looking for its chosen occupation as the result of 
its educational process and wonderful achievements of 
mind followers. We hope it will take no long rest, but 
will be active and strongly imbued with the spirit of a 
true redeemer, Christ purified, Christ gifted with love, 
and Christly transfigured before every citadel of want 
that holds the key of progress ; and we hope that 
Spiritualism will boast of something besides its tests. 
Those buds of promise have in a measure served 
their purpose ; and people on earth must now help the 
angels to do a broad and beneficent work. 

It is well understood in spirit life, and felt to the 
heart's core in earth life, that the government of the 
united umpire of America, and also old Britton's de- 
vastation of rule, must come under the scathing power 



174 APPENDIX. 



of Almighty justice. One soul cry is as good as a 
thousand heart throbs of anguish to know that there 
is something rotten in the denmarks, and the stench 
must be removed, that every soul bearing responsibility 
may breathe free and pure. Every person must be 
protected, loved and cared for ; every child educated, 
fondled, made happy and accepted by the world as 
everybody's child, to help God with, and thereby re- 
move Satan, whose power is so keenly felt at present, 
and which the educated world are ashamed of, and 
secretly wonder what can be done to stay this marching 
fiend, treading in all the money marts of the world's 
corporation. What can be done to bring the angels 
nearer — humanity more loved, blessed and protected ? 
God understood and put in the right place, Satan 
caged and held by the lock of reason, and spiritual 
growth established beyond a doubt. What can be 
done to bring about all these good things ? Why, this 
can be done, must be done, and will be through the 
ranging of spiritual light, through corporated and 
individual efforts to hasten God's day of resurrection 
on earth, when the spirit of man detects the wrongs of 
a government that can cripple one human soul, and 
bare its breast of honor to fight to the death the treason 
foe to a nation's unity and progress. Spiritualism must 
do God's work, because it is in and of God — the second 
comming of mediumistic light that will escape the 



APPENDIX. 175 



crucifixion of its umpire to save ; and we feel like say- 
ing, Ho ! ye harvesters and saviours on earth, do your 
work well, for the hour is at hand when the record will 
be shown. What has Spiritualism done to make reforms 
the speaking voice of God, moving to action the soul 
of the universe — humanity in motion and union of 
power and purpose ? There is no use of asking God 
to do the work that has been given unto us to do ; and 
if we fail to do it we are held accountable for our 
neglect in complying with the mandate that ye love 
one another — do good unto those that persecute you, 
for charity wards off all danger to the spirit, that 
should be the peace guest in every home and the saun- 
tering friend ever beside us. 

Let love be the power and might of the soul, 

The true bosom friend that our actions control ; 

The signal to service, the lion in tread, 

Then wherefore, oh friends, can we find aught to dread. 

— Parker. 



I 



